Posts filed under 'Yahoo! News'

Be Your Own BOSS

Create your own version of Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! has been saying for a while that search should be open, and it’s tough to imagine it getting much more open than our new Web services platform — Yahoo! Search BOSS. BOSS, or Build your Own Search Service, is just that — a programming interface that lets you create your own version of the Yahoo! algorithmic search experience.

If your Web site also generates content, this is something that might be useful to you. What BOSS lets you do is pretty wide open. Read the Yahoo! search blog or our developer site for the gory techie details, but with BOSS you can re-rank natural search results or blend them with your own content; customize the search result presentation to match your user interface without Yahoo! branding or attribution; use a framework we provide to mash up BOSS search content with other data sources; access Web, news and image search; and get unlimited queries.

And what can you do with all of that? We’re sure you can think of something.

– The Team

Sell Your Products Globally

Put the “worldwide” in your Web with Yahoo! Sponsored Search

Is your company looking to expand abroad? International sales can be a great way to boost your company’s growth, and Yahoo! Search Marketing is a simple way to get targeted customer leads. With the announcement of the opening of three new markets for Sponsored Search — Southeast Asia, Latin America and India — now’s the perfect time to consider getting a few new stamps on your “advertising passport.”

Using Sponsored Search in our international markets offers many of the same benefits that you have advertising with Yahoo! Search Marketing in the U.S.: the familiar “Panama” user interface, control, and distribution via both Yahoo! and our partners’ properties.

Southeast Asia
The opening of our Southeast Asia market helps businesses reach more than 53 million potential new customers in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Yahoo! is, in fact, the most popular online network in Asia Pacific (comScore, May 2007).

Latin America
Yahoo! Search Marketing tiene mucho gusto to announce that Sponsored Search is now open for business across Spanish-speaking Latin America. This new regional marketplace enables advertisers to target customers in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Chile and Argentina from a single account in that marketplace.

India
The “subcontinent” is a huge and growing Internet market, and the opening of this third Sponsored Search outpost means you can target Indian consumers not only on Yahoo!, but also through partner distribution sites such as MSN India and OneIndia.

— Jeff Hecox

Get AMP!’d

Yahoo! plans to change the way you advertise

Every so often, entire industries are transformed by innovation—and we at Yahoo! think we’re on the verge of transforming the advertising industry. It’s an industry ripe for transformation. Especially with display ads, everything from finding the right audience to booking inventory to testing ads is decidedly old school, and not in the good way. With AMP! from Yahoo!, our forthcoming advertising management platform, we plan to change forever the way you interact with everyone in your advertising world—and make it even easier to get the right ads in front of the right users. Read about it, and see a video of it in action, in this post by Yahoo! President Sue Decker.

Common Enemy

Yahoo! and Click Forensics team up to fight click fraud

The enemy of your enemy is supposed to be your friend, right? Well, the biggest enemy of Yahoo!’s traffic quality team is click fraud, which is why we’ve just become friends with click-audit company Click Forensics.

We’ve teamed up with Click Forensics, a well-known click auditor that attempts to track click fraud numbers, including publishing quarterly discard rates. The obvious question is, why would we work with a company that has been a critic of search marketing? Because, frankly, we care so much about click quality that we’re willing to work with anybody who can help us—and our advertisers—drive a better return-on-investment.

About the Partnership

How will we work together? In this new partnership, Click Forensics can act as an intermediary for advertisers and work with us on specific advertiser issues when advertisers request help from both of us.

Click Forensics generally provides a way to help advertisers understand their click data, and now can provide Yahoo! with more information on behalf of the advertiser if there is a question about traffic quality. If you are already a Click Forensics customer, you can also use your Click Forensics reports as the basis of click investigations.

Click Forensics can provide us with additional data that may help us update our traffic-quality measures, so even if you’re not a Click Forensics customer, you can still benefit.

What We Do for You

This fits in pretty nicely with what we’re already doing. Our Click Protection System, one of the best in the industry, typically discards between 12 and 15 percent of clicks before you pay for them.

Coming soon, you’ll be able to see for yourself the clicks that our system identifies and doesn’t charge you for. Our new Click Filter report will show you how many total clicks are being discarded, and the percentage of your total these clicks represent.

Of course, dealing with click fraud is not all we’re doing to improve traffic quality, whether it’s pricing discounts on traffic from certain partner sites, or the ability to block domains from which you don’t want to receive traffic.  But when it comes to getting insight that could improve our traffic quality, a little extra help is always a good thing.

– Reggie Davis, VP of network quality

Search Is Opening Up

Yahoo! Search gives Web site owners ways to make their search results more relevant

You’ve been hearing a lot of talk from us lately about openness—open ad exchanges and open development platforms—but now Yahoo! Search itself is open. As an advertiser, this gives you a way to add much more relevant information about your site to our search results—and have more control over the way that information is displayed.

“Because the platform is open it gives all Web site owners—big or small—an opportunity to present more useful information on the Yahoo! Search page, as compared to what is presented on other search engines,” says Vish Makhijani, SVP & GM, Yahoo! Search in a blog post this week. Instead of just a title, abstract and URL, you can add into your search results the data currently buried in your websites—things like ratings, reviews and images.

You should read the whole post on the Yahoo! Search Blog, but to whet your appetite, here are before-and-after examples of the difference when a social media site like Yelp starts adding some of its content to search results:

Before:

After:

You’ll be hearing more about this change in the next few months. Time to start thinking about how openness could help you.

—The Team

Introducing All-You-Can-Eat Web Hosting

Beginning today, Yahoo! Web Hosting has gone “unlimited”

Editor’s Note: If you have a web site or want to build one—and since you’re doing search marketing, we’re guessing that’s probably the case—Yahoo! has good news for you. Starting today, our colleagues in Yahoo! Small Business are offering unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited e-mail storage to their web hosting customers.

Yahoo! Small Business customers have told us loud and clear that they want getting online to be as easy and painless as possible. Instead of worrying about things like, “How many visitors can my site handle?” and “How many pages can I build?,” small business owners want to focus on growing their businesses and driving traffic to their sites, feeling comfortable knowing their hosting package will grow with their business.

The new Yahoo! Web Hosting offers unlimited disk space, unlimited data transfer, unlimited email storage and 1,000 email accounts—all for $11.95 a month. For the very large majority of small business owners who want a professional-looking site in hours, the decision to choose Yahoo! has suddenly become much easier.

Don’t know the first thing about web design? No sweat. Every Yahoo! Small Business service includes award-winning, easy-to-use web site design tools that can help business owners with little or no technical experience to quickly and easily build great-looking sites. You’ll also get a free domain name and 24/7 customer support, plus your satisfaction is guaranteed for 30 days. And if that wasn’t enough, Yahoo! Small Business automatically optimizes your web site and submits it to top search engines (I can think of a pretty good one) to help customers find your business.

Existing web hosting customers have already received an email invitation with the option to migrate to this new plan. If you’re not an existing customer and you want to get your business online, please visit Yahoo!’s Web Hosting site for more information.

Now go spread out. There’s plenty of room!

— Guy Yalif, Director, Web Hosting Products, Yahoo! Small Business

Calling all Search Superstars!

Searching for Searchlight Award Winners

Now that the holidays are behind us, we can all start to focus on the next seasonal reality…awards season. It seems that just about every industry now has their own awards showcase (when it’s not getting cancelled due to the writers’ strike).

So why should all of us in the search world be left out in the cold? Well, I’m happy to announce that our time has come. On February 12, we’ll be holding the 3rd Annual Yahoo! Searchlight Award showcase in New York City. If you haven’t been to it in the past, it’s a must-attend event. You’ll get to hear the insights and strategies behind four of the best search marketing campaigns from 2007. One winner will be crowned the 2008 Searchlight Award winner. (Previous winners include Avenue A/Razorfish and RPA.)

You’ll also hear a great keynote from one of the most digitally savvy and forward-thinking agency minds. Rob Norman, CEO of Group M Interaction, will kick us off with his thoughts on what’s hot in 2008 and beyond. Rob is as witty as he is brilliant, so we’re really excited to have him this year.

We also have four great panelists who will be helping the audience decide who deserves the award. The panel will question the presenters, offering their own insights and providing their own analysis of the work.

Our panelists include the following:
Abbey Klaassen - Digital Editor, Advertising Age
Kevin Ryan - Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies
Greg Sterling - Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence
Brian Morrissey - Senior Reporter, Adweek

Greg and Brian have been with us since we kicked off the Searchlight Awards and we warmly welcome them back. We are also excited to have Abbey Klaasen and the inimitable Kevin Ryan join us for the first time as panelists.

Do you have a campaign from 2007 that you’d like to submit for consideration? Would you like to see your agency featured in a full-page print advertisement in one of the trade publications? Do you want the glory and exclusivity to boast that you are the best of the best? (Yes, yes and yes, of course.)

If so, I would like to personally invite you to submit your campaign at http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/searchlightaward/. (You can also use this link to register to attend the awards.)

We look forward to seeing you in New York to help us decide who will win the 2008 Searchlight Award. In the meantime, we hope your 2008 brings marketing success to you and all of your colleagues.

—Ron Belanger, VP, Agency Development

New Yahoo! Shortcuts for WordPress

Supporting Material for Your Blog

A nifty new WordPress plug-in lets WordPress bloggers use Yahoo! content to support their bloggery. When you’re composing a blog post in the WordPress admin interface, the Yahoo! Shortcuts beta plug-in automagically begins matching terms in your post to Yahoo! aggregated content, such as company names, stock tickers, map locations, news, product names and Flickr photos.

You decide whether to keep or reject any (or all) recommended shortcuts before your post goes live. When you publish, your selected shortcuts appear in your post according to the format you choose. It’s very cool.

For more info, check out this post on the Y! Search Blog and definitely have a look at the tutorial. 

—Michael Mattis

Get Trendy

Studying This Year’s Trends can Help Prepare You for Next Year’s

When I was young and rebellious—as opposed to middle-aged and rebellious (just ask my boss)—to be called “trendy” was considered kind of an insult. It was the last thing that any self-respecting post-punk dada nihilist with big hair and a bad attitude wanted to be.

Later, I discovered that it’s good to watch and benefit from trends. If you’re selling hats online, for example, it might behoove you to know that Britney Spears-style fedoras are selling like hotcakes these days. As a seller of baby-T’s or greeting cards, you might want to know that “Jacob” is one of the top names chosen for newborn boys, and so forth.

We try to keep you abreast of search trends through our Buzz Index. The top trends on Yahoo! Search in 2007 have been recapped on a special site. Highlights include:

Sports:

1. NASCAR
2. Maria Sharapova
3. Boston Red Sox

Yahoo! Kids:

1. Games
2. Animals
3. Dinosaurs

Tech:

1. YouTube
2. Wikipedia
3. Facebook

Celeb downfalls:

1. Britney Spears
2. Paris Hilton
3. Anna Nicole Smith

del.icio.us (popular tags on the popular bookmarking site)

1. Design
2. HDTV
3. Games

For the complete list, click here.

Maybe it’s time to think about selling toy dinosaurs, or retailing Boston Red Sox caps or high-def TVs. Or maybe you should just sit tight and keep an eye on the trends for 2008. Either way, stay trendy by visiting the Yahoo! Buzz Index Buzz Log frequently.

—Michael Mattis

Photo courtesy Bazpics via Flickr.

Beyond Feeling Lucky

New Yahoo! Search Gets Prospects Closer to Done

Ever heard the expression, “How do we get to yes on this?” It’s the modern version of the old used car salesman question, “What do I have to do to get you into this car?” except without the loud suit.

At Yahoo! we’re all about the “getting to yes” thing. And here at Search Marketing, we try our level best to help our advertisers get their prospects to yes every day.

But consumers see it a little differently. What consumers—your prospects—want when they search is to get it done. When users search, they usually have a task in mind that they want to get done and as quickly and painlessly possible, though sometimes they’re not sure how to get there.

Enter Search Assist. It’s a new feature on Yahoo.com that intelligently assists searchers, helping them get to “to done” in one search. When a user begins to type in a query and has difficulty, Search Assist is activated and anticipates where the user is likely trying to go, and automatically offers a selection of search term suggestions and related concepts to the query. The user can then select the search term or concept that most closely matches his or her needs, or continue to type the query.

Often, people will begin a search with only a partial idea of the language they need to use to find what it is they want. Search Assist works on the fly, inferring the user’s intent and offering search suggestions.

For example, a search for “vans” may yield “vans shoes,” “vans warped tour,” and “used vans” as suggestions —that’s three very different uses of the word “vans.” Related concepts may present “skate parks” and “apparel” as options.

So what’s in it for you, the advertiser? Well, if users get what they want faster and what they want happens to be what you’re advertising… Well, you don’t have to be the chairman of the Federal Reserve to figure it out.

—Michael Mattis

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