Yahoo promises Bing competition
Yahoo has moved to dismiss reports that it is withdrawing from search by unveiling a host of changes to its search engine user interface.
On July 29th 2009, Microsoft announced that it had reached an agreement that will establish its Bing search engine as the exclusive organic and paid search platform for Yahoo.
Under the terms of the deal, expected to come into force next year, Microsoft’s AdCenter will also take over as the pay-per-click service of choice for Yahoo.
The linkup intensified speculation that Yahoo was pulling out of search altogether to concentrate on other business interests.
However, Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior vice president of Yahoo, told a corporate press conference that this was not the case.
“We are not a version of Bing,” he said. “We are Yahoo and that will continue...We collaborate on the back-end but we are competitors on the front-end.”
Yahoo unveils search engine updates
Yahoo has also announced a host of updates that will be made available later this year.
For instance, a people search on Yahoo could soon bring up a sidebar inviting the user to show results from social media portals like Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Meanwhile, videos may be viewed without leaving the SERPs and a box powered by security specialist McAfee should block risky links.
Some SEO specialists have welcomed the changes but others have argued they may come too late to transform the public perception of Yahoo as a failing search engine.
Writing on Search Engine Land, analyst Danny Sullivan suggested the innovations had been in development for several months and do little to prove that Yahoo remains committed to search in the long term.
