Posted on 04 May 2008 by Jeremy Hermanns
If Microsofts walkaway from the Yahoo deal is indeed a ploy to save $5 billion, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may have proven himself pennywise and pound foolish. He was prepared to spend billions to finally make Microsoft a serious rival to Google. For a bit more, he may have destroyed Microsofts chance to get there.
Continue reading “Leaving Las Yahoo: Microsofts $5 Billion Mistake?” on Search Engine Land Now
Posted on 25 April 2008 by Jeremy Hermanns
YOS: Rewiring Yahoo From The Inside Out
Yahoo’s relatively new CTO Ari Balogh expanded upon Yahoo’s “open” initiatives in a keynote speech to the Web2.0 conference yesterday.
Check it out!!!
Posted on 01 February 2008 by Jeremy Hermanns
I cannot believe the press this morning, but it’s official Microsoft has made a hostile takeover bid for Yahoo! All of us in the SEM industry have heard this ‘rumor’ before, now it’s for real!
The announcement of Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo! didn’t come as a total surprise, these two courtesans have danced around before. A merger of these two have been speculated over for the past 18 months, ever since the companies discussed collaborating in late 2006.
Make no mistake; this deal will close. The $31 per share offer represents a 62% premium over Yahoo!’s market close Thursday.
How can the Yahoo! Board say no? We can’t find many reasons (especially with T.Semel no longer pulling the purse strings). Either way, they should not combine the names; as you can see above neither is very appealing “Yah-soft” or “Micro-hoo” (both sound like childrens candy names to me)
See Latest News Coverage:
Microsoft, Yahoo! In Possible Partnership Talks
A Messy Marriage
Microsoft/Yahoo Merger to Take on Google?
5 reasons to worry about a Microsoft/Yahoo merger
Justice Department likely to review a Microsoft-Yahoo merger
UPDATE:
BlogNewsChannel posted an amazing writeup on the proposed merger see below:
* About 30% of the search engine marketplace. Microsoft has wanted a position to challenge Google for a long time, and this would give them a big enough search engine to hopefully make some noise. However, Microsoft would have to reverse Yahoo’s decline in order to take advantage of that market share.
* Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Hotmail. Yahoo claims 255 million email account, Microsoft 280 million. Reports put Gmail at around 51 million accounts. If properly leveraged, Microsoft’s 500 million-plus accounts could represent an insurmountable number one.
* Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger. As of 2006, Microsoft had 61% market share worldwide, good for #1, and Yahoo had between 27% and 37%. Yahoo’s number were the same as AOL Instant Messengers (there is more than 100% because users often use more than one client). Google Talk is a non-factor practically abandoned project, and Microsoft one-two punch could bury this market for good.
* Advertising revenue. Microsoft pulled in $1.5 billion from its online services division in 2007, most of it in ad dollars, losing $510 million. Yahoo made $7 billion in 2007, turned a profit of $700 million, on $6.088 billion in advertising revenue. It isn’t quite Google’s $16 billion, but Yahoo is a profitable online advertising company, and gives Microsoft a strong, larger base to grow from. It will take seven year for Yahoo to make enough revenue to cover the acquisition cost.
Posted on 30 May 2007 by Jeremy Hermanns
European Yahoo advertisers were updated to Panama Platform today. US publishers have been using Yahoo Panama sponsored search starting from October 2006 and today Yahoo officially notified European users via email about the advertising system upgrade.
Those European advertisers who were not updated automatically are encouraged to request for an upgrade at Yahoo Upgrade Center.
Hope Europe will appreciate Yahoo Panama system as US did!
Posted on 28 May 2007 by Jeremy Hermanns
It was reported lately that Yahoo put links to the third-party sites from their home page. Previously Yahoo used to link to content published on the sites of Yahoo company network but the screenshot provided by Michael Arrington at TechChrunch shows that Yahoo’s started experimenting with linking outside their property sites.
Posted on 15 May 2007 by Jeremy Hermanns
Have you ever thought what makes you and other search engines users to choose one site from the search results or another? Well, even if you haven’t focused your attention on this before Yahoo has made it for you. Conducting a survey which became a patent application, Summary Attributes and Perceived Search Quality, Yahoo has determined some rules and clues to what parameters of the summary retrieved from the site make user choose it from among the other results and follow the link.
The experiment run by Yahoo included a number of summary quality estimation parameters such as Text Choppiness, Snippet Truncation, Query Term Presence, Query Term Density, Abstract Length and Genre.
Posted on 14 May 2007 by Jeremy Hermanns
A pretty nice image search function was discovered by WebmaseterWord participants in Japanese version of Yahoo! When clicking an image in Yahoo Japan Image Search results it is opened in a larger view and a flash player arises which rotates the images one by one.
With the player you can choose whether to go further or backward through the pictures, stop viewing them or get to more detailed info about the image.
