SearchDay is our free daily e-mail summarizing the day's search marketing news. See example.

May 25, 2006

"Add To My Yahoo" Feature Removed From Yahoo SERPs

I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Yahoo seems to have removed the "Add To My Yahoo" button from the search results. In the past, when you conducted a search at Yahoo and the sites in the results had an RSS feed, Yahoo would often enable the searcher to click on a "Add To My Yahoo" link, which would place the RSS subscription directly into the registered user's My Yahoo home page. I am not exactly sure when Yahoo removed this feature.

This is not to be confused with Yahoo removing the "block" result link from the SERPs back in March. The "block" and "save" features are part of Yahoo "My Web" and not "My Yahoo." It is possible that this is related to features expected to be released soon from My Web 2.0, but I am not sure as of yet. I will send a note to Yahoo to try to get more details on this.

I do have images of the before and after at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:15 AM | Permalink

March 22, 2006

A Deeper Look At Personalized News Search Engines

Mark Glaser at MediaShift wrote a great review named Your Guide to Personalized News Sites. He reviews the history of personalized news sites, and discusses many of the new free options people have to search news with a personal touch. Here is a listing of some of the engines he reviewed;

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:31 AM | Permalink

January 26, 2006

Yahoo's Senior VP of Engineering to Become Chief Product Officer

Over on Gigaom, Om Malik reports that Yahoo will name Ash Patel, the senior VP of engineering as their new chief product officer (CPO). Patel will replace Geoff Ralston, who according to Malik, is leaving for "parts unknown."

Om writes: I sat next to Ash, and got into a spirited discussion about why Yahoo is really all about My.Yahoo.Com. My contention is that forget search, because Yahoo has something better than that. My.Yahoo.Com is no longer a portal page, but instead an ?attention page? which can be and should be leveraged to become the aggregator site for complicated digital life. Ash, who spent a lot of time on that particular page - building it I mean - agreed.

I wonder what, if any plans, Yahoo has for their uncluttered and ad-free search interface at Search.yahoo.com. In the past year they have modules with news headlines, email access, and stock index info. In many ways it has the potential to be a My Yahoo Lite that could also work on Yahoo's mobile platform. It would also be useful to offer a module with recommended posts (personalization) from feeds you subscribe too? How about allowing developers the chance to build modules for this page? This page already allows the user to customize which search tabs are visible. Although in the past few months they have made it a challenge to do this. One thing is for sure, when I show the Search.yahoo.com page to end users during presentations, I almost always here and audible "oooh and aaah" with people going on to say that they had no clue that it existed and they're thrilled to know about it.

Om also reports that Yahoo Instant Messenger for the Mac (aka Mac Communicator) should be coming soon.

Bow, the departure of Geoff Ralston is yet another Yahoo exec leaving. In the past few weeks we've blogged about several others departing Yahoo including:

Posted by Gary Price at 6:49 PM | Permalink

November 21, 2005

Add To Google & Save To Yahoo My Web Buttons Out

Nick at Threadwatch discovers a new Add To Google button, while I'm also overdue to discuss the new Save To My Web button that Yahoo kindly rolled out last month. Let's jump in!

The new Add To Google button is easy to implement. Fill out the form at Google, then you get the appropriate HTML. Insert the button on your home page, then when people click, they are directed to add your feed to either their personalized edition of the Google homepage or Google Reader. Adding it to Google Sidebar, sadly, isn't a third option. That should be supported as well. Hopefully, we'll see it come.

As for the new Yahoo button, Yahoo announced it at the end of last month. In fact, I'd been asking them for one publicly, so they came back in that post and specifically called me out to say "Here it is!" But I was on vacation at the time, hence me playing catch-up!

It's very welcomed. My Web is the future of where search is heading at Yahoo, as A Search Marketer's Look At Yahoo My Web 2.0 covers in more depth. Getting your pages added and part of the trust networks that My Webbians are building over there is important. This button makes it easy to encourage that type of saving.

To get the button, there's no form to fill out. You just grab JavaScript code from here. That puts a little button on your site. When people push it, your page title will be grabbed, along with the URL and some suggested tags for saving the page under.

Nick at Threadwatch has gone a step further. He's used the code to make a link-text only version of the save to my web feature. He discusses it more here, and the code is here.

Why not just use the button? By using Nick's code, you can custom the text of the link, in case you want to give people more instructions. For example, look over in our left-hand navigation area. I've used both the button plus Nick's code underneath, altering it to stress that this is "Yahoo" My Web, something the button doesn't say.

Down the line, I want to move that type of code over to the bottom of posts, to help encourage people to save them. Having that as a textual link makes it a bit easier. And if you're going to do it for My Web, why not for bookmarking service Del.icio.us? That's easily done through this code spotted via Threadwatch.

Are all these buttons worthwhile? I still can't tell if they are driving that many sign-ups, but I've fallen into the "learn to love them" category. While having one unified sign-up system might be better, if having an Add To Google or Add To Yahoo button means I'm going to get some additional visitors who recognize what that means, I'm going for it.

Want to love buttons yourself? See Getting Add To & Subscribe Buttons For Feeds, which I've posted for Search Engine Watch members. It takes you to the forms for popular services, so that you can merrily make your own badges.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:34 AM | Permalink

October 10, 2005

Yahoo Integrates News, Blogs & Flickr Search Results

Yahoo is testing a new approach to delivering news search results, combining traditional media sources with "citizen journalism" from blogs and images from its Flickr photo sharing site.

Although not the long-anticipated blog/feed search that we know is coming soon, Yahoo's blending of news and blog sources is a nice way to get perspectives on current events from both professional and amateur sources.

Run a search on Yahoo News and your results will include traditional news sources from the 6,500 media outlets Yahoo crawls, as always. On the right side of search results you'll also see a pane with blog search results. Click on the "all blog results" link at the bottom of this pane, and you'll see a page with additional blog search results, as well as a new pane displaying Flickr images that have been tagged with keywords relevant to your search terms.

Results are sorted by relevance, with an option to sort by date. You can also use the new "topic tracker" to add your query to My Yahoo, or click the xml button to add a feed for the search to an RSS aggregator.

Blog posts are drawn from those included in the My Yahoo feed directory, a collection in the "high hundreds of thousands" of blogs. Yahoo plans to expand this coverage to the millions of blogs that ping its blo.gs service, but gave no date for when this additional coverage would be rolled out. Yahoo also plans to launch a stand-alone blog/feed search service in the near future.

The integration of blogs and news in Yahoo news search results is well done, clearly separating professional news sources from blogs, but making it easy to get content from multiple sources. Yahoo says that it's an easy way to expose the 20 million plus monthly Yahoo news users to the world of the blogosphere.

If you publish a blog and would like to be included in blogs displayed in Yahoo News search results, see the Publisher's Guide to RSS which has instructions on submitting your RSS feed to Yahoo.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:00 PM | Permalink

October 1, 2005

How About Custom Search Tabs From Google & Yahoo

When running a Google web search from the Google home page or the Google Personalized home page, you can quickly rerun your search (no need to reenter your query terms) in another Google database by simply clicking one or more of the tabs labeled (Images, Groups, News, Froogle, Local, and Desktop (if available and installed). Easy to use, a possible time saver, and easy to explain to novice searchers. Nice!

However, as you know, Google offers many other databases that can be discovered by clicking another link that's visible on the Google home page labeled "more." Here you'll find access to Google Blog Search, Google Directory, Google Scholar, Google Print, and more. The problem, albeit a minor one, is that when you click "more" and then want to run your current query in one of these databases, you need to reenter the entire search string. Believe me, this is not a major issue. However, for allowing a user the chance to carry-over their query (let's say from a web search) to one or more of these databases would be useful.

Perhaps Google should consider providing what Yahoo currently offers on their clutter-free search.yahoo.com page. Here, the user (you don't need to login with a Yahoo ID) can customize which database tabs are visible on their home page. The other useful part (in addition to the customization) is that your search queries will carry over from one database to the next. Let's hope that if/when Yahoo releases their RSS/blog search tool, a tab will become available on the clutter-free page. Bow, note to Yahoo, how about adding Yahoo Audio Search tab option to the clutter-free interface?

I realize that many tools exist like FaganFinder and MrSapo, and Soople (to name only three) that allow you to move from one database to the next with great ease. However, I wanted this post to focus on what Google and Yahoo offer on their native interfaces.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:09 PM | Permalink

September 12, 2005

On Designing a New Yahoo Home Page

Via Geeking With Greg, an interesting BusinessWeek interview titled: Building Yahoo's New Front Door, with Larry Tesler, the UI design guru who joined Yahoo in May after working at both Apple and Amazon.com. Tesler chats about his design philosophy and developing a redesigned, clutter-free Yahoo.com home page that is developedslowly, "bit by bit." A new home page is good news for Yahoo since the current Yahoo home page is a very frequent reason people tell me they don't like the service. Of course, there is another solution that's already available but not mentioned in the interview. Yahoo's clutter-free and customizable home page at search.yahoo.com. Tesler goes on to tell BusinessWeek that he doesn't want to "lock" people into using only Yahoo when they come to the site.

From the interview: We don't want to be a walled garden where you come to Yahoo and can't leave. We love it that people spend 13% of their time on the Yahoo network by choice. We're not trying to lock them in there. But each property within Yahoo wants to make sure it's getting traffic links from other places -- and one that it would obviously consider important is Yahoo's front page. Because of that, we do a lot of collection of usage metrics. What drives traffic to different areas? And what is the most effective use of the front page? We can't really make a couple of square inches of front page be everything for everyone. We make some choices based on that objective data.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:16 PM | Permalink

June 1, 2005

Yahoo Adds News Headlines "Module" to Yahoo Mail Home Page

A few hours ago I noticed that my Yahoo Mail home page (the page visible after logging-in) now contains a "module" labeled "In the News." It offers headlines and direct links to five news stories. A pull down allows the user to see headlines for six news categories. I wouldn't be surprised to see other new "modules" (RSS feeds? Stock Prices? Local Weather?) in the near future. Here's a screen cap of what I'm seeing.

Yahoo made a similar "tweak" at the beginning of 2005 for My Yahoo users who utilize Yahoo's clutter-free and customizable search.yahoo.com homepage. The changes (still available) allow a My Yahoo user to see current news headlines, view the number of unread mail messages in their Yahoo Mail inbox, and review the current Dow Jones market average. All of these "modules" can be made visible/invisible with a quick click.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:46 PM | Permalink

May 19, 2005

Yahoo Surveying Web Searchers

Michel from El Telendro dropped me a note about a survey that Yahoo is asking random web search users to complete about the My Web beta. People who complete the survey are offered a chance to win $1000 in a monthly Yahoo sweepstakes. Michel grabbed a couple of screenshots and posted them here and here.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:00 PM | Permalink

April 26, 2005

Yahoo Bolsters Personal Search

That didn't take long: Last week, reviewing the new Google My Web Search service, I wrote "don't expect Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN or AOL Search to stand still." Tonight, Yahoo has rolled out a significant enhancement to the My Yahoo personal search features that the company launched last October. New features include search history, the ability to save cached copies of pages, new sharing tools and more. Tomorrow's SearchDay article, Yahoo Launches My Web Personal Search (available to blog readers now), gives a rundown of the new service from Yahoo.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 8:00 PM | Permalink

April 21, 2005

Comparing Search History Features

With Google having released its new Google My Search History feature yesterday, I wanted to spin back around and look at where we stand in terms of search history offerings across a number of major search engines. I've done so in chart format below.

Before diving into the chart, let me stress that this isn't a "have the most features and win" contest. Some features you might not ever use. What search history features seems to work best, like the search engines themselves, may fall to your own personal decision.

Even among the editors here at Search Engine Watch, we all love different things. Personally, I find the A9 and Google tools the most compelling, because they automatically save what I'm looking for. I think it's cool that Ask, Yahoo, and A9 have categorization and annotation features in various manners, but those aren't something I expect to use myself. Others may -- and that's why it's great that they are offered.

Chris and Gary are very much into tools that save the full-text of documents and let you search against them. I'm leaving it to them to them to do a separate recap on how tools stand on that front. Gary's also playing with the Filangy, which is a closed beta, and reviewed it yesterday here. It's not on the chart below because being a closed beta, it's not something everyone can use yet.

Personally, I've loved the Google Desktop as a way to keep track of everything I've seen exactly as I saw it when visiting pages across the web. It's largely solved my own search history desires at Google, as I've written before. But the additional features from Google are definitely welcomed.

On to the chart! A guide to categories follow it below.

Feature

Ask

Eurek ster

Find ory

Furl

Google

Yahoo

Auto Save

Yes

Pause

n/a

Yes

n/a

History Search

Yes

Date Sort

Yes

Term Sort

Yes

Site Sort

Yes

Notes

Yes

March 12, 2005

Mobile Access to Your My Yahoo RSS Feeds

As Danny pointed out the other day, mobile access to info and search services continue to be of interest to me. Services from new players as well as from established companies are appearing on a daily basis.

As this CMPNet Asia story points out, that the mobile version of My Yahoo now allows you to view your RSS feeds via your WAP browser. In other words, My Yahoo joins Bloglines from Ask Jeeves as services offering mobile tools to access your feeds. More info and details about how to access your feeds via My Yahoo Mobile in the story: Yahoo Launches Mobile RSS News Feed and in the Yahoo Search Blog post: My Yahoo! Mobile RSS.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:11 PM | Permalink

January 14, 2005

Yahoo Gains Financial Feeds; A Revisit To Yahoo News Feeds

Yahoo gained RSS feeds for news content last fall, and now it has regained them for the Yahoo Finance service, Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny reports in his Yahoo Finance RSS Feeds Return post.

For financial feeds, visit the Yahoo Finance RSS feed tool that's now been created. Enter a symbol, and magically, logos to add the feed to your My Yahoo account or any newsreader through an XML icon and URL will appear. Slick.

Note that the tool doesn't check whether the company stock symbol you enter is valid, so ensure that you have it correct first. Jeremy notes in his post that you can enter multiple symbols separated by commas (yhoo,goog) to make a "portfolio" style feed.

How about a revisit to getting those Yahoo News feeds? OK! First, visit the Yahoo News RSS Feed page. There, you'll find a variety of feeds in various categories such as "science" or "health" have already been created.

Not enough? Need something custom. Scroll down to the search box, enter a term and a feed will load in your browser. Ugh -- that needs to change to work like the Yahoo Finance tool, where you get clickable links.

Have no fear, there's a better workaround. Go to Yahoo News, do a keyword search for what you are interested in. Now look in the right-hand column of the page. You'll see an "ADD TO MY YAHOO! / RSS" section. Use the My Yahoo button that's offered to subscribe through My Yahoo or the XML icon to subscribe through other means.

As a reminder, over at MSN Search, feed support web search results was added this week. More on that here: MSN Search Makes RSS Search Feeds Official.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:28 AM | Permalink

December 2, 2004

MSN's Third Portal To Gain Blogs; Where's The Blog Search?

MSN is now offering blogging space through its new MSN Spaces service, making it the third major portal to jump into this area. The first? Google, of course.

Google a portal? Sure, a stealth portal. It's got all the traditional portal features of email, search and free home pages -- or at least the successor to personal home pages, blogs. You just don't see them all displayed in a traditional portal format.

My Google Buys Blogging Company - But Why? article from Feb. 2003 looks at the issue of blogs as a portal feature and Google heading down that path. One of the predictions in it, which was obvious to many, was that once Google knocked over the blog domino, other portals would follow.

AOL launched its AOL Journals service in September 2003. Now with MSN in the space, that leaves just Yahoo among the majors.

Yahoo still has the GeoCities personal home pages service (valued at $3.6 billion when acquired in 1999 -- in contrast, Google likely paid only a few million for Blogger). But I'm sure we'll eventually see Yahoo gain a blogging system as well.

All this is great for those seeking to build blogs, though it has nothing to do with search. What none of the majors yet offer is an actual blog search service.

Yahoo is the closest now, making it at least possible to search to find blog feeds but not through actual blog entries. MSN has promised an actual blog search engine to come out later this year. Google's also said last year that a blog search would come, though it gave no timeline about when. Aside from the majors, we list a number of other blog search engines here.

For more details of the new MSN Spaces service, see this ClickZ article: MSN Enters Blogging Fray with "Spaces". And as an aside, Microsoft blogvangelist Robert Scoble says he's sticking with the Radio UserLand service and provides a wrap-up of reaction to the new Microsoft entry.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:15 PM | Permalink

November 22, 2004

My Yahoo Upgrade Leaves Beta

Matt Hicks at eWeek reports that the My Yahoo beta that's been around for about two months has gone live.

Since launching the beta, Yahoo has doubled the number of searchable feeds to 300,000, [Scott] Gatz [Yahoo's Senior Director of Personlization Product] said. Users also can subscribe to any feed by entering its URL and by browsing a directory of feeds that Yahoo editors maintain. My Yahoo has about 20 million users, and Gatz said that millions chose to switch to the beta of the upgraded service. He declined to specify what proportion of users has made the switch. Also during the beta, Yahoo fixed a series of bugs and improved My Yahoo's Web compatibility with the Firefox 1.0 Web browser, Gatz said.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:50 PM | Permalink

October 5, 2004

My Yahoo Search Offers Personal Search Features

Just a day after releasing Yahoo Local, Yahoo has launched My Yahoo Search, offering several new features that allow you to save, annotate and search listings from Yahoo search result pages.

Chris Sherman has a full rundown here in SearchDay: Yahoo Introduces Personal Search. I've written a companion piece for our Search Engine Watch members looking at how personalization impacts the task of search marketers and especially how Yahoo's new "Block Site" feature operates: Search Personalization: A Marketer's Perspective.

Chris finds personalization at Yahoo is nicely done but underpowered compared to some other similar services and more a good start than a must-use application, in his view. I'm much more positive.

Talking with both Chris and Gary, they seem to especially like services that let you both save sites you've visited and search against the text of the pages you've found. That's why they love things like Furl, which LookSmart recently acquired.

Me, I'm not so bothered about needing to search through the pages I've found. Heck, I found them. I know what's on them. Instead, I find myself more interested in trying to recall what I searched for originally and remember sites I found as matches for a query.

For that, I've been loving a9's features. It's automatically keeping track of things for me, but it also gives me the quality of Google's results. In fact, I find myself more and more disliking the fact that Google itself isn't keeping track of things for me automatically.

Now Yahoo's jumped in with great search quality and easy to use "search memory" features as well. For an ordinary searcher, I think it's really compelling. I especially like the simple way someone can make a note right within the search results, plus the ability to have things remembered automatically if the Visited Results feature is enabled.

Ask's new personalization features are compelling in much the same way, to me. So in a matter of just weeks, I find these tools to me now being an essential part of any search engine's offering -- and a nice return for the majors since the last time they were tried, by MSN back in 1999.

What about Google, the most notable of the majors now without them? Google tells me it has no future plans for search memory-style tools to announce at this time. Instead, personalization remains restricted to the Google Personalized Search beta service that alters things based on interest areas and Google's Site Flavored Search, which operates in a somewhat similar manner for publishers.

Want to discuss or comment? Please visit this thread in our forums.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

See More Posts From:

This Week | This Month

Legal Notices, Licensing, Reprints & Permissions

Privacy Policy
Affiliates

var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-564586-7"); pageTracker._setDomainName(".searchenginewatch.com"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); window.collarity_appid = "incmedia"; //> //>

Top Jobs

more Jobs

Account Director
InkHouse Media + Marketing Waltham, United States

Online Marketing Strategist
M&T Bank Buffalo, United States

Director, Ecommerce
Tekessence Inc. , United States , United States

Digital Marketing Manager
Tibco Software Palo Alto, United States

White Papers

more Research