Archive for May, 2009
May 29th, 2009
Since launching SearchMonkey last May and Yahoo! Search BOSS last July, the global Yahoo! Search team has reached some impressive milestones: BOSS is now serving 30 million queries a day, and SearchMonkey is celebrating its first anniversary with 70 million enhanced results viewed daily.
Along the way, we’ve made great headway in opening up Yahoo! Search by accelerating the adoption of structured data across the Web and empowering developers to innovate in search. Here’s a look at some of the important initiatives we’ve accomplished with SearchMonkey and BOSS.
With BOSS, we’ve made key updates including allowing developers to monetise through third-party platforms and enabling access to SearchMonkey structured data. The BOSS API is on track to hit 1 billion monthly queries in May, without even including the volume from traditional Yahoo! Search syndication. This is more than three times the queries served just six months ago, and ranks ahead of the combined searches on Ask and Facebook, and just behind Microsoft1.
With SearchMonkey, we’ve launched numerous valuable initiatives over the last year. In Australia we have turned applications default-on for results from sites such as Wikipedia and Facebook to improve reference and social searches. We‘ll also be enabling publishers to more easily display enhanced results for video, games, and documents. Additionally, as a part of efforts to promote a more meaningful understanding of the Web, Yahoo! Search continued to support semantic tech gatherings such as VoCamp.
SearchMonkey is currently live in Australia along with 22 other markets around the world, reaching some significant global milestones:
- 70 million enhanced SearchMonkey results are viewed by users every day.
- Site owners have seen a more than 15% increase in the click-through rates of their SearchMonkey search results when tested against non-SearchMonkey results.
- 200 people enter the developer tool and start creating an application each day.
- Over 15,000 developers have registered to build applications, with over 70 applications available to Australians for customising results for sites such as Twitter, MySpace and flickr.
- RDFa structured data driven by SearchMonkey has increased by 413% since October, 2008.
In the coming months with SearchMonkey, we will be driving efforts toward increasing structured data on the Web, more uses for existing structured data, and easier ways to display enhanced results for some data types. We’ll throw in a little fun, too, with some open customization of the Yahoo! Search results page. With BOSS, you can look forward to more specialised searches that will help consumers reach their content more easily than ever
We want to extend our thanks to the developer communities within both SearchMonkey and BOSS and to partners including Facebook, LinkedIn, for joining us in our efforts to make search richer and more open, and for helping us reach these milestones. We’re pleased with what we’ve done in this past year. More importantly, we’re excited about and focused on where we’re taking you next.
1comScore qSearch April 2009. Queries delivered via the BOSS API and served by Yahoo! partners are not counted as Yahoo! Search queries by comScore or other metrics providers.
May 29th, 2009
Over the past two years there has been a lot of discussion about the closure of Yahoo!7 360° and the transition to our new profiles experience that we’ve had in the works. Today, we’re able to firmly say that on July 13th, 2009 Yahoo!7 360° will be closing down and you’ll be asked to move into your new profile on Yahoo!7, by July 12th, 2009.
While we know that many of you have faithfully used this service over the past few years, our goal has been to find a way to unify your social experience and connections across all of Yahoo!7 and anywhere you travel across the Web. So, while we’re sad to say that we will no longer be supporting Yahoo!7 360°, we’re excited about this larger plan and hope you’ll transition over and be a part of it, too.
We also want to reiterate our commitment to preserving your blog content. We have been working to make sure we put the right mechanisms in place so that you can move your content and minimise disruption. It is with this thought in mind that we’re happy to introduce a new blogging feature that is integrated into your profile. You can find more information on this below.
With your new profile on Yahoo!7 you’ll be able to connect with other people on Yahoo!7, and share your updates and activity with the people you meet on the Web.
While we know many of you are frustrated by this decision, we’d like to address some of the main questions you might have. If your question has not been addressed, please see our Help pages and list of frequently asked questions for more information. If you’d like to discuss this change, or, ask a question that was not addressed in the help pages or in the content below, please visit the Profiles News Blog at: http://www.yprofileblog.com/. Though, I can’t promise to answer every question, I can promise to create additional posts on common issues and trends to make sure “hot topics” are addressed.
Why is Yahoo!7 360° closing?
Though 360° gained a strong core of loyal users (you) who enjoyed the service, Yahoo!7 has been reprioritising some products to help us deliver the best possible experiences to consumers. The decision to close Yahoo!7 360° and transition users to Profiles is part of this larger strategy, but we had been waiting until we had an alternative solution that we could offer to our community of Yahoo!7 360° users until we officially shut down 360°.
It’s been almost two years since you first announced 360° was closing—why shut it down now?
Before we could retire 360°, we had to find a sustainable and adequate solution for your personal information. We know how important your blog entries and profile information is to each of you, and we wanted to be able to maintain the integrity of this content. Rather than rushing the process and risking data loss, we worked on a broader solution across Yahoo!7 that would meet our future goal of providing you the best possible social experience while at the same time protecting your privacy and data. We’re happy to say that we now have a solution that satisfies all of these requirements.
What is going to happen to my blog?
We know that many of you decided to blog in 360° because you enjoyed sharing your content with the people you met on Yahoo!7, which is why we’ve created two options for your blog and all of its content.
The first is: you can start blogging on your profile on Yahoo!7 — we’ve created an all new blogging tool that will let you post content and also allows you to integrate photos right from Flickr. Once you create an entry, your post is automatically pushed out in your updates stream to your connections, saving you the hassle of sending out links to your latest entries.
A second option that we’re providing you is the ability to export your blog and all of your content and to any of the supported blogging systems (don’t worry — they’re popular sites like WordPress, Blogger, and MoveableType). We’ll even generate an archive with all of your entries and photos and will send you a link to download the archive.
First you shut down Mash, now you shut down 360° — why should I give profiles a shot?
We understand you might have doubts — in the past few years, you’ve seen a couple of social sites come and go, and it means a lot to us that you’ve stuck around while we’ve tweaked each experience. Know that we’re committed to having a universal profile across Yahoo!7, and we’re committed to working with you to improve and evolve this profile to make sure it’s what YOU want to use. That doesn’t mean we can implement every piece of feedback you provide, but it does mean we’re listening, and we are going to do our best to make sure your interests are incorporated into future releases and versions of your profile.
What about customisation and photos? On 360° I can change the look and feel and upload multiple photos—can I do this with profiles?
At this time, your new profile does not have all the features and functionality of your 360° profile. However, we are looking at incorporating new ways of expressing yourself through your profile.
In regards to uploading multiple photos, your profile on Yahoo!7 allows for only one primary photo for now. This is also something we’re looking at improving/expanding based on your feedback.
We know that you will have lots of questions about 360° closing and how it will affect each of you. Be sure to check out the Customer Care help pages (including the FAQ’s) to help make this transition as smooth as possible.
Thank you.
Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager
May 27th, 2009
Senior Executive Officer? Synthetic Engine Oil? Synchronous Equatorial Orbiter? [singlepic id=1 w=320 h=240 float=right]
Yes, it can mean all those things but I’m only going to talk about Search Engine Optimisation here, because that’s what I do at Yahoo!7.
By definition, SEO is the art and science of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to a web site from the ‘organic’ results of search engines. This is achieved by ensuring the content and code is ‘search friendly’ and the pages are effectively linked.
The ‘organic’ results (also referred to as ‘algorithmic’ or ‘natural’ results) are those that a search engine displays and orders based on their proprietary relevance algorithm, rather than the auction-style paid ads which are ranked depending on how much the advertiser bids per click (plus other factors).
Simply put, if you want more people to visit your web site you HAVE to think of search engines as your most valuable visitors – and if you’re not, you can be sure your competitors will be, if they’re not already.
I’d hope you don’t need much more convincing, but just in case:
You may even have found this page via a search engine, but have you ever wondered exactly how the results are ordered in the way they are? This question obsesses all search engine optimisers and much as I’d love to give you a simple answer, there really isn’t one. Let me give you a brief history of web search to put this into context.
Back in the pre-Cambrian era of the internet (the early 90′s) search engines had only a few million documents in their indexes and it wasn’t very challenging to spoof your way to a high ranking for almost any keyword phrase with a little effort. As the World Wide Web became available to ‘normal’ people (well, mostly) and broke free from the educational, research and scientific community, the number of pages on the internet grew exponentially – driven by commerce and increased access to connected personal computers. No longer could relevance based on meta data assigned by the author (such as the meta keywords tag) be trusted, making it difficult for search algorithms to sort the spam from genuine content. At this time you were more likely to find better results using a human edited web directory (such as the Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ, the Open Directory Project). Web search technology was struggling to cope with the deluge of new data and high proportion of low value content.
Clearly, it wasn’t feasible to solve this problem using humans to classify every page so the ever-growing processing power of computers, coupled with the availability of increased bandwidth, was applied by some of our era’s brightest brains to reverse the decline in search result quality. As ways to monetise search were proven, investment increased. Algorithms became much more complex and ‘off-page’ factors (for example recognising the relative importance of links from other pages, where your site is hosted and calculations of how relevant inbound links are) made spamming the search index much less successful.
Let’s jump back to the present. Modern search engines now assess hundreds of individual factors to determine what a document is about and where it should be rated against others for a given query. I use the term ‘document’ because PDFs, Word documents, video files and other bodies of information can appear in a search result, not just HTML pages. It’s a significant challenge to spoof your way in and the penalties of getting caught doing so are costly. Of course, the cat and mouse game played by spammers will probably run for a long time, but it pays to play by the rules (for example, you should understand the Yahoo! webmaster guidelines).
With so many moving parts it’s impossible to reverse-engineer search algorithms to find the perfect recipe for success; the constant flux of competing sites, search engine servers that update at different times, the personalisation of results based on previous activity and your geographic location are just some of the factors that obfuscate the underlying process. This is why using an experienced SEO (search engine optimiser) or search marketing agency to help increase your search traffic can be the best investment you’ll make.
Over time I’ll write more about how to get started with your optimisation process and will include some useful tips, tricks and tools. If you have any specific questions or would like me to cover particular topics please let me know by leaving a comment.
If you have any questions leave a comment!
Aidan Beanland
Regional SEO Manager
Tags: Aidan Beanland, SEO
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