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Posts Tagged ‘news’

Yahoo! has recently introduced an inline video play feature that shows videos directly on the video search results page. Now, searchers can view videos directly on the search results page without entering the site where a particular video is hosted.

The inline viewing feature happens to be a bit controversial feature since the sites boasting videos will definitely want the traffic to the sites. With the large number of embeddable videos and the new feature, searchers will end up viewing videos off-site.

Anyway, if searchers wish to use the inline viewing feature they can click “Play Now” under the thumbnail of the video search result. This will open a large overlay window and play the video on the results page.

Interestingly enough, Yahoo search engineers have been doing a great work to give you an enhanced Yahoo search experience. This is an interesting news coming when the Yahoo-Microsoft deal is just few months from materializing. The most prominent of the search enhancements is the new Yahoo search page design which according to a post on the Yahoo Search Blog “will make search more personally relevant and helps people explore things that matter most to them.” Here are some new things that have been rolled out on Yahoo Search:

• A unique search page design realigning with the new Yahoo Home Page.
• Easy access to various Yahoo search features including Search Pad, Search Scan and Safe Search have been made more easy.
• Addition of “Related searches” in the search assist layer.
• Enhanced search results from more sites such as Wikipedia

The enhancements made by Yahoo are being tested out to a selected percentage of U.S users, but might take some more time for you to see it live.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Yahoo- Rolling Out Search Product Enhancements

Antonio Gulli, the technology team lead in Ask.com's European R&D center is leaving Ask.com after serving for four years. At Ask.com, Antonio worked on:

• Image Search
• News and Blog search
• Video News Search
• DailyBeast
• Core Web Search Infrastructure
• RealTime Fresh Web Ranking
• Core Frontend Platform for UK

Here was Antonio's bio prior to joining Ask.com:

'Antonio was the creator of the first Italian Search engine in 1998, Arianna, and he was CEO/CTO of Ideare (sold to Tiscali S.p.a. in 2001) where he created products such as audio, video, and image search. Antonio has recently been working on a PhD in Pisa, researching the areas of Information Retrieval, Web Clustering, and Web Ranking technologies. You can explore his areas of research and play with the applications that he has developed at http://www.di.unipi.it/~gulli/.'

It was in March that Google had updated its mobile search image just for the sake of iPhone and Android gadgets. But now the good news is that they have rolled out images updated image search to other additional phones as well in about 38 languages. The update will include both larger thumbnail images as well as search filters.

To search images, click “images” that will take you to Google image search page in place of the page where the actual image is hosted.

To view Google image on your handset, you need to start with Google.com in the mobile browser and select “Images”. A number of pictures will appear, select your desired image.

-phones/6893/”>Google announces Updated Image Search to Additional Phones

American's news source, The Onion reports via Google Blogoscoped that Google has a new service that lets you opt out of Google services if you want to protect your data or privacy. Below is a satirical video from the news source:

Over the past few months, discussions have been going on in the Webmaster Center Blog regarding how to optimize a site! Recently, Kristin Meldahl of Bing highlighted some of the recent information that the Webmaster Center team has published on optimizing site architecture in their SEM 101 column. The information appears to be useful to webmasters and web publishers. There are four recent posts that focuses on various aspects of site architecture optimization, such as file/page issues, links, content and page meta information. The posts are:

Site Architecture and SEO – file/page issues (SEM 101)

Making links work for you (SEM 101)

Architecting content for SEO (SEM 101)

Head’s up on tag optimization (SEM 101)

The series of posts is indeed very helpful and useful for webmasters. For more information on site optimization, keep visiting the Webmaster Center blog .

Earlier this year there was a lot of talk about a possible Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo. As we very well know the deal did not push through. This time we can be sure that Microsoft is a lot happier having finally inked an important deal with Yahoo.

Microsoft and Yahoo have signed a 10-year agreement stating that Yahoo will be using Microsoft’s Bing as its search engine. In turn Yahoo will be the one taking care of the search advertisements appearing next to the Bing results both for Microsoft and Yahoo.

This is big news indeed because Yahoo Search will no longer be as we know it. The partnership is obviously strategically advantageous to both since they still lag behind the search giant Google. Microsoft did see an increase in market share when they rolled out Bing but ended up making a dent not on Google’s market share but on Yahoo’s. With Yahoo Search’s users migrating to Microsoft it is clear why Yahoo would want to use Bing to power their own engine. As for Microsoft this is a good sign that , as Nick Wingfield of Wall Street Journal put it, the tide is finally turning and “that things may be finally starting to look up for Microsoft.”

Google of course be on its toes with this news but since they have never been one to rest on their laurels it won’t be a challenge they will really be too afraid of. Add to this fact that search users, being deeply ingrained in their habits, will likely not be migrating to Bing in droves despite the new deal. I believe that it would take something more revolutionary than Bing for people to feel that the effort of shedding their old habits (however little that effort may be) is worth the reward of using a search engine (or whatever it maybe be called in the future) they are not familiar nor comfortable with.

In the meantime what is great for SEOs about this news is that with Microsoft and Yahoo using just one engine we now have one less engine to keep track of. At the same time this also means that we’ll have to ramp up our efforts in learning more about Bing and what makes it tick. We cannot discount its combined market share.

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Microsoft-Yahoo Tie Search Tie Up

If you are a Bing fan as well as good at composing jingles, then participate in the “Bing Jingle Contest.” The Bing team is organsing this contest to see interesting music about Bing. The primary aim of this contest is to videotape yourself performing an original “jingle” that you’ve written, describing the attributes of the Microsoft search engine, Bing.

Here’s an introductory video.

The last date to submit your video entry is on 31 July, 2009, and winner will be announced on 5 August. The winner will be picked based on number of views and quality ratings they get on their video. They will be rewarded with a $500 American Express gift cheque.

To know more about the competition click here.

The “Bing Home Page Photo Contest” is in its final stage of voting. More than thousands of amazing photographs were received, which made it difficult for Bing team to limit themselves to only top 8 finalists. The photos that would draw people’s attention, tell a story or compel you to find out more, were shortlisted. Moreover, these photos had to work within the confines of the page and adhere to the official guidelines. It was really amazing to see all of the creativity and talent of the community.

Here are the top 4 finalist:

Based on the total number of votes, the winner will be chosen. All of the top photos and photographers will be featured on the Facebook page. The winner will be declared on July 27th and the winning photo will be displayed on the Bing Homepage on August 3rd.

So, what are you waiting for? Go Vote!

Microsoft recently announced that it’s going to ramp up MSNBot 2, which is currently in beta version. Webmasters may now notice the new bot in their log files. The beta version was released in December 2008, and the useragent is similar to the original bot.

New Bot:

msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

Current Bot:

msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

The new bot promises a more efficient crawl. Microsoft states:

“We are busy working on our improved crawler and plan to ramp up its workload as we move toward the goal of putting it into full production. As a result, webmasters may begin seeing an increased amount of traffic from the new bot on their sites.”

Feel free to report any issues about MSNBot 2 at the Bing forum.