Yahoo: In 'search' to be better

By Renjith VP, SiliconIndia   |   Thursday, 04 November 2010, 13:29 IST
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Bangalore: Things haven't gone exactly the way to be 'yahooo'ed for the internet services corporation Yahoo! But the company is back with a revamped look and a never say die attitude amidst the heating up search engine war led by Google. Yahoo has been in a desperate attempt to resist various approaches of acquisition previously from Microsoft and currently from AOL. And the revised look and performance of Yahoo search engine web mail services are obvious testimony to this. Though social networks have evolved as a key form of communication, Yahoo thinks 'so what, we still play our cards' and has rolled out a new version of its Web-based Yahoo mail product that boasts faster performance, new capabilities, and yes, even more social networking features. Yahoo was out of competition for some time and had been suffering from low market shares, which seemingly has made its top officials think and brainstorm reasonably. It had been playing the underdog story for long, never able to touch the huge 60 plus percentage market share of Google. Yahoo in its new positioning has been trying to play user friendly by adding many user friendly features that adds value to the user and please the advertisers through it. For people who think 'So what's new?' Yahoo says its latest email product performs twice as fast as the previous version, according to internal tests. And the company says an improved search feature makes it easier to cull through the morass of messages that have accumulated in your inbox over the years. The main area where they are trying to ideate hard is its point of conflict with Google. They have added Picasa and Flickr photo perusal feature which saves effort for the user when accessed through mail. The changes make Yahoo search quite different from Microsoft's Bing, although both are based on the same technology. Yahoo obviously wants to make its search more streamlined and give it a curated look, instead of letting the user pick from a long list of links. Now, when you search for entertainment or news-related topics, instead of a long list of results, you'll get a box with vertical tabs that give you several different ways to examine the topic. Yahoo Mail is also adding some social savvy, by alerting you to unread email messages from the friends and contacts that it has somehow determined are most important to you. And in addition to typing out traditional email messages, the new Yahoo Mail lets you quickly fire off status updates to Facebook friends, Twitter followers, or Yahoo network connections. All those changes they hope will at least check competition with Bing if not match the radiance of Google. So far Yahoo's new search site has received mixed reactions from the users and marketers. Some see it as clumsy and jumbled while others are excited about the changes. Although Yahoo controls some of the Internet's most popular sites like Flickr'both Yahoo's share of the Internet search market and the advertising revenue derives from searches have been in steady decline, causing some industry watchers to question whether CEO Carol Bartz's turnaround plan for the company can succeed. But the new search enhancements fabricated under his direction focus on more relevant, entertainment-centric results. It is also planning to release a series of "quick apps," the first of which will come from Netflix. Every move seems to be a good roar after a hiatus but now we have to look forward for one thing ' market shares, which should reflect the vibrancy of the changes. And not to mention, a never resting Google will be keeping track of the new stride by Yahoo to be a better brand.