Yahoo! Search Engine Archives

Barry at Search Engine Land points out that Yahoo India has glue pages, which some people are comparing to Universal Search, because of classic search results on the left hand column, visual information in the center column and bottom right hand corner (in addition to articles), and sponsored results.

Here's a screenshot for a search for trees. Click to enlarge.

The idea is pretty cool and sticky (pun intended) and the results page is definitely more aesthetically pleasing than the standard 10 blue links. It kind of reminds me of the current Ask.com format:

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Over the weekend, Microsoft finally backed off Yahoo and has decided to pull their offer to buy Yahoo and also decided they would not pursue a hostile takeover of the company. That sums it up basically. Now, if you want to read more, let me send you to Search Engine Land where we covered the news extensively.

• Microsoft Yanks Its Offer For Yahoo
• Leaving Las Yahoo: Microsoft's $5 Billion Mistake?
• Yahoo Next Steps: Google Deal, AOL Purchase & Pleasing Investors

Yes, this weekend's news is still dominating Techmeme's front page. So again, if you want to read Microsoft's letter to Yahoo or Yahoo's response or future thoughts, check out those links.

Many now believe Yahoo will begin outsourcing their search ads to Google. The advertisers want it based on the past test, it seems like Yahoo and Google both enjoyed it. So we should hear some news on that this week.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Last week Yahoo added a nifty feature to Yahoo Local Search. For example, let's say you are looking for the nearest ATM machine. You can type in ATM, and then your zip code. But you won't be shown the nearest ATM within an X mile radius always.

Yahoo let's you plot the diameter of the circle and drop the center of that circle anywhere you want. Yahoo will then refine the local results based on the radius you selected and the center of the circle. Here is a quick video demo:

It doesn't seem like this tool is without bugs. A WebmasterWorld thread reports a blackhole issue.

I went looking for pizza places in Manhattan and noticed certain places disappeared even if you move the circle a hundred yards or so. You'd suddenly find black holes in the middle of Manhattan where there were, according to yahoo, no pizza places. Budge the circle over an eighth of an inch and the same pizza-free streets would suddenly fill with pizza joints, so there's still some work for them to do.

In any event, a unique and interactive solution to searching locally.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Search Engine Watch Forums moderator, abbottsys, posted detailed feedback on Google Ads Being on Yahoo Search. The Search Engine Watch Forums thread has only one post but deserves a lot more participation, in my opinion.

Normally, I would summarize, but I am not feeling so well and abbottsys does a great job, so let me quote him:

1) My ad was subscribed to Google Search and the Google Search Partner Network, but it was not subscribed to the Content Network

2) I bid high so I could be sure of seeing the ad. I also shut down all my native Yahoo campaigns. As soon as I shut them down my adwords ad took over on Yahoo.

3) My ad appeared at the top of Google and Yahoo. My ad ranking on Yahoo was slightly better than on Google.

4) Changes to the ad were reflected with equal speed on both Google and Yahoo.

5) I found it *very* convenient that I could manage my Yahoo campaigns from AdWords. I've always been a big fan of the AdWords management interface, which I feel is *far* superior to Panama, AdCenter, or any others out there. In fact, I was surprised how refeshing it was not having to mess with multiple ad management platforms.

6) As regards ad performance (CTR, conversions) I was very happy. Of course, since this was a Yahoo test I have no idea if these clicks were charged or even reported in my AdWords account. But the ad did perform well.

7) I've been doing this PPC stuff since 1998. My overall comment on this particular experience is that it was great. I really liked it from all aspects.

8) If this test leads to a full ad distribution agreement between Yahoo and Google my only additional request would be that my AdWords ads show up on the Yahoo Content Network. Currently ad distribution on this network is a mess, and needs to be upgraded. Yahoo clearly has infrastructure problems with ad delivery on their Content Network. Letting AdWords handle this would be a much needed upgrade!!!!

9) Bottom line. As an advertiser I simply loved this! Two thumbs up!!!!!!!!

In the meantime, the DOJ is investigating the Google/Yahoo ad test. So even though some advertisers might love to see Google provide the search ads for Yahoo, the DOJ might prevent that from happening.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

WebmasterWorld members report that Yahoo has announced its new crawler, Slurp 3.0. Now, when you analyze your weblogs, you'll be seeing Slurp 3.0, though it recognizes the same user-agent and robots.txt as before.

More importantly, they are invalidating all other Yahoo Slurp IP addresses and using brand new ones for this update. IP-based rules will need to be changed.

Search Engine Land provides more information, where Barry writes that the new IP addresses will still reverse DNS lookup to crawl.yahoo.net.

On WebmasterWorld, your work is getting more complicated, according to Wilderness. There are still 11 different spiders and 5 user agents to keep track of. But Barry explains this clearly: "If you set directives for "Slurp" or "Yahoo! Slurp," those will remain working, but if you specified "Slurp/2.0," then you may have an issue."

It is kind of funny, in that Yahoo's spiders are having the same old problems that Yahoo's business unit is having. Remember the Peanut Butter Memo, where Yahoo talks about their lack of clarity between all their business units and properties. It's all too familiar once again.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

Note: "Me" in this case refers to Barry. I'm only here to report about Slurp 3.0. ;)

A HighRankings Forum thread asks when did Yahoo stop grouping search results from the same domain together? We reported on an issue with Google not grouping certain results a few weeks ago, but it is rare to see Google not group results in many cases. But Yahoo doesn't seem to be grouping any results from the same domain together, at least not today.

For example, a search on george bush at Yahoo shows three results from the White House web site, and two right next to each other, but none of them are grouped together:

A search at Google on george bush groups a few of the results together, when the domain is the same, including the White House results:

So where did the indenting go Yahoo Search?

The thread also talks about missing how Yahoo used to number the results, but that is an older topic.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Update: Yahoo has actually never grouped results. I have official confirmation from Yahoo on that.

Yesterday I reported that one of the many Yahoo announcements were that Yahoo was going to test running Google ads on Yahoo Search USA.

According to a Search Engine Watch Forums thread, the Google ads are now live on Yahoo. Note, if you don't want your Google ads to show on Yahoo, you need to opt your ads out on showing on third party search providers. In any event, some advertisers are noticing that their Google ads are showing up in Yahoo sponsored results.

As expected, the ads don't appear as AdSense ads - they simply look like Yahoo ads. SEW moderator explains, "Yahoo seems to be configured as a Google Search Partner, not as an AdSense publisher." In addition, he adds, "Initially (i.e. earlier today) I was only seeing my ad a small percent of the time (i.e. Yahoo was only including it on a fraction of the SRPs for a given search), but now I'm seeing my ad 100% of the time." But the ad is only showing when he stopped showing his native Yahoo ad, i.e. the Google ad won't show for him until he tells Yahoo to stop showing his Yahoo ad.

His conclusion so far?

The net effect is like a pooled ad resource, where Google and Yahoo have pooled ads to run on Yahoo (and maybe soon on both engines?)

Note, this is supposedly only suppose to impact 3% of Yahoo's search ads in the US. It is also suppose to run only for about two weeks.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The saga continues with a very unusual night for Yahoo yesterday. Let me catch everyone up with what happened yesterday. Follow the timeline, all reports are linked via Search Engine Land (times are estimates and EST):

• 15:00 (EST) - Confirmed: Yahoo To Test Google AdSense For Search Ads, has confirmed reports from Yahoo that they will be testing Google's ad on Yahoo.com search results in the US for a 2 week period.
• 16:00 (EST) - Microsoft: Forget It On Paid Search Partnership, Google & Yahoo, has a response from Microsoft that they will take them to court if they made an ad deal with Yahoo. Basically, it would give Google a 90% or more share of the search ad space.
• 21:30 (EST) - Report: Yahoo & AOL Approaching A Deal, has a second report from the WSJ that now even thought they are testing things with Google and Microsoft wants them, they may make a deal with AOL to bring in the AOL division in exchange for a cash investment.
• 22:00 (EST) - News Corp, Google, AOL, "MicroHoo" The Movie Enters A Surreal, Climactic Sequence, now we have reports from the NY Times that News Corp is interested in joining forces with Microsoft to make a bid for Yahoo.

Got all that, now that all happened in a 12 hour period yesterday. It was like, a wow, after a wow, after a wow and then another wow!

Michael Arrington thinks Yahoo is making a huge mistake:

It’s time to end this thing before Yahoo ends itself. I don’t care if they throw AOL, MySpace, and half the rest of the Internet into the deal along with Yahoo. But the health of the Internet demands a counter balance to Google.

He now says, "Yahoo-Microsoft, given the current state of things, is the only reasonable outcome."

I wonder what the major shareholders are thinking right now, especially after Yahoo's second largest investor, Legg Mason backed Yahoo against Microsoft, only now to have to deal with all this crazy news.

How will this impact SEMs? It is unclear right now. But if Google does power Yahoo's search ads, then it will make Google even stronger and that quality score and the Google slap can impact more SEMs then ever. Of course, it will give SEMs once less search ad company to master.

Forum discussion at these following threads:

• Confirmed: Yahoo To Test Google AdSense For Search Ads, Sphinn
• Breaking: Yahoo, AOL Close In on Tie-Up Deal, DigitalPoint Forums
• Microsoft Said to Be Talking With News Corporation About Joint Yahoo Bid, WebmasterWorld
• Microsoft: Forget It On Paid Search Partnership, Google , Sphinn
• Report: Yahoo , Sphinn
• Yahoo , Cre8asite Forums
• Yahoo search result show up Adsense?, Search Engine Roundtable Forums
• Yahoo Search to run Google ads, DigitalPoint Forums
• Yahoo to test search ad outsourcing with Google, WebmasterWorld
• Yahoo! Teams up with Google to Offer AdSense Ads in Yahoo! Search Results, DigitalPoint Forums
• Yahoo, Time Warner closing in on AOL deal: source, WebmasterWorld

Last week, I received a preview of some of the radio commercials Yahoo just started running. The commercials are aimed at trying to build more awareness of Yahoo Search. Some of the commercials target Google.

Elinor Mills has some quotes from some of the ads.

Search engines like Google get you lost in all the links, but not Yahoo search.

You won't find that on your Google page!

I am going to see if I can get some clips of these ads to add to this post later.

What do SEOs and Webmasters think? From a WebmasterWorld thread:

On a serious note, these ads have proven to be extremely dangerous as I almost drove off the road in disbelief when I first heard it.

Dead medium for a dead search engine. Pretty appropriate.

As long as they're polluting the results with paid inclusion, it doesn't matter how many radio spots they buy. People will still prefer *any* other engine which doesn't sell out the results.

Anyway, time will tell if it works. They are currently not doing any TV ads, like some other search company tried to do.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo To Announce "Search Monkey" Enhanced, Annotated Results At SMX West from Search Engine Land explains it better than I can, so read it there. The Yahoo blog calls it the open approach to search.

What is it? Basically, it gives publishers a way to tell Yahoo how to enhance their search results for free in Yahoo. It is basically works on the user end like the Google Coop Subscribed links, where a user needs to opt in to see the enhanced results. But Yahoo told me, they differ in that the publisher doesn't give Yahoo a list of queries on what triggers the results, but instead, Yahoo will convert the results to an enhanced listing when it feels the user will benefit from it, as opposed to when the publisher feels the user would benefit from it. I believe that is the main distinction here and not necessarily what Danny said in his postscript (I can be wrong of course, but I think I am not - reminder to head over to SEL and postscript). :-)

What does it look like?

Before:

After:

How do I implement this for my site? You can't. At least not just yet. This is just an announcement that Yahoo will enable this feature in the future.

Okay, so when Yahoo does launch it, how do I implement it? I am told there is a simple to use feed of some sort. Honestly, they would not give me many details on it at this point. I have a feeling this part is currently being worked on and they can go several routes on the final implementation. But I hear there will be multiple methods to implement this.

How do users get this? They need to opt in via a "Add to Yahoo Search" button.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld where Brett Tabke says this is an "awesome development." I am not so sure.

TechCrunch got a tip that Yahoo Search is testing integration Del.icio.us results in the search results. In my opinion, bad idea Yahoo.

Michael Arrington says it "Delicious search is one of the best ways of searching for things when a standard search doesn’t pull up what you are looking for." True, but Yahoo search users won't understand it. They simply won't get it.

We have discussion on this topic at Sphinn where SEOs and SEMs weigh in. One person said this will lead to more Delicious spam, "so begins the mass creation of Delicious accounts meant to spam." Of course, for bloggers and delicious users, we are happy, as one person said, "What a great step that would be, given word of mouth is a bigger influencer of our purchase behaviour than is any other variable." But as Michael said, "excellent idea, horrible integration, stumbleupon nailed it on the head, the delicious integration is is inferior hopefully they will bring it up."

Still, I don't think Yahoo searchers would get it. I don't even think most Google searchers would get it.

Yahoo just sent me a screen capture:

It should work for you on a search for JAVA, but it doesn't work for me in Safari.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Bill Slawski recently wrote an interesting post entitled Yahoo Replaces PageRank Assumptions with User Data. In the article, he discusses a "User Sensitive PageRank" patent application filed by Yahoo that addresses the flaws with PageRank. These flaws include the assumption that all links are created equal, bored surfers don't go to random pages, bored surfers don't always go to only trusted pages, pages change value at different rates, and sometimes PageRank calculations cheat.

The Yahoo patent will replace some of these assumptions with user data about how they surf the web.

The title of this post was inspired by the Sphinn discussion that ensued where Matt McGee suggested a new name. Bill further makes the point that PageRank needs to be adjusted:

I think that this points out the value of making a strong site that influences people to stay and look around, focusing upon other things like usability, too.

However, many people believe that Google is doing the same thing. After all, most folks want the PageRank tool to go away, but it's probably just a matter of replacing it with something better.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

In the old days, if you conducted a search at Yahoo Search, Yahoo would automatically number the results for you. So of the 10 listing, Yahoo would display the rank number on the left of the result.

Here is an example of that in action for a search on google at Yahoo:

Now, the same search, does not display the numbers:

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yahoo has announced they have revamped their search interface with a from "to do" to "done" approach. Basically, they have launched Search Assist, something they have been demoing for a while and revamped how multi-media is represented in the search results.

What is search assist, well the link above explains it, but in short, it is like Ask.com's refine search features but a bit more AJAX'ish. If you do a search on anything and click on the little arrow under the search box, it expands to show you those refinements:

Plus now if you search for multi-media related searches, you may get video results that can be played within the search results, like you can with Google results:

My only complaint is, where is star wars kid video? If I am searching for the star wars kid, I suspect to get a video, Google gives it to me. But typically, if you end your search in video, such as Michael Jordan Video, you will get a video result. Interesting how Yahoo is able to embed Meta Cafe's video into their own site, didn't Google have copyright issues with that?

Here is the detailed release as a PDF file [1.1MB], plus there is a ton of coverage at Techmeme, including Greg's coverage and Loren's coverage.

So now the top four search engines have somewhat blended or made their search results more "universal" within the year. A transformation as to what they have been doing in the past, is now the standard (kind of not at Ask.com but they get it done) at the four major search engines. For past coverage of each engine read:

• Google Revamps Search Results Landscape with Universal Search
• Ask.com Relaunches in 3D with Ask X Interface
• Microsoft Launches New Search Index & Algorithms

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Users from the United Kingdom on the Search Engine Roundtable Forums report that they are now seeing the Yahoo Search Suggest feature.

Yahoo is also rolling out Yahoo Search Assist, which is still in limited beta, and this is a screencast of those new features as taken by Barry yesterday:

I still don't see either of these new features since it's being slowly rolled out to those of us in the US, but Search Engine Land confirms that the Search Suggest feature has been rolled out to all UK users.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Last week we reported on a Yahoo update and a new method of crawling. The new crawl behavior is supposed to help the Yahoo bot, Slurp, be more efficient on your site.

It seems that many SEOs and Webmasters are not happy with this change.

A WebmasterWorld thread has several negative comments:

OK, this is completely bogus and helps nobody. The number of IPs that Slurp uses? WHO CARES...

The fact that Yahoo has multiple crawlers for every division that crawl independently and don't share the common cache, now THAT's a problem that needs to be fixed.

We get 50% of our pages crawled every day.

Well Yahoo is a waste of bandwidth on one of my sites (a large directory). It hammers it almost every day and has only sent about 975 referrers this month. That is so low that I wonder if people even use Yahoo in Ireland for anything other than e-mail. I am strongly considering blocking it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Danny over at Search Engine Land breaks some news about the Yahoo! Search Engine. Yahoo has come out with Search Assist, which is a smart and selective tool to suggest particular search terms and appears when you need it (like when you've stopped typing). It also shows related topics.

Danny's screencast shows what it's all about.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

It seems to be the consensus on a DigitalPoint Forums thread that if you post your URL to Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo will index your site a lot quicker than you'd normally expect.

A member asks how long it takes for sites to start being indexed in Yahoo. Apparently, not long, if you utilize this practice. That's not to say that you should spam your site URL throughout Yahoo! Answers, but if your website is related to a question being asked and can help someone find the answers, then it may be useful.

A much older WebmasterWorld thread says that without this practice of linking in Yahoo! Answers, you can simply wait the standard time of 6 months to one year to be indexed.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Last Thursday, July 19th, the Yahoo! Search Blog announced that they have started rolling out an update.

We've been rolling out some changes to our fresh web data and crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We expect the update will be completed by the weekend. So, as you know, throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index.

Since then, I have been waiting and seeking out threads discussing changes people have seen to the rankings in Yahoo. But I have yet to see any thread discussing any shifts and changes in the Yahoo Search results.

Typically, the forums spot these updates before they are announced. In this case, the announcement was made and still, there is fairly no discussion about changes in the search results.

There is a WebmasterWorld thread discussing the announcement of the update. There is one person saying he saw an increase in traffic from Yahoo, "One of my site was getting 1 or 2 daily from yahoo, suddenly it got 10 so far now." But outside of that, the only discussion in the forums I track are from the Y!Search Blog announcement.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld

Update: People are now discussing minor changes in ranking.

An increased amount of people are noticing that Yahoo has added search suggestions after users type more than two letters in the search field on Yahoo.com. This was first reported by Search Engine Land but was discovered recently by DigitalPoint Forums members.

(Ironic, isn't it?)

The feature, according to many, is called "Search Suggestions." In fact, according to Barry's report on Search Engine Land, you can disable it if you don't like it, which some DigitalPoint Forums members have done.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has a member stating that although his site was banned from Yahoo! Search and was denied reinclusion into Yahoo's index, he was still able to guarantee inclusion through Yahoo's paid inclusion program.

Yahoo's paid inclusion is now named Search Submit and it is a program that allows you to send Yahoo your pages, and if approved, Yahoo will guarantee to crawl those pages often, plus give you the ability to send them more meta data.

The major issue with being accepted into paid inclusion but being denied to the normal Yahoo crawl is that they both should follow the same quality content guidelines. Yes, the paid inclusion program has a set of content guidelines. But whatever is displayed within the search results have to meet Yahoo's overall quality guidelines.

The member explained the process:

1. Banned by Yahoo!
2. Made some changes
3. Given the opportunity to participate in Paid Inclusion, which you have to be good enough for regular inclusion to participate in.
4. Attempted regular inclusion...we were told NO.
5. Looking at Paid Inclusion again because we can advertise in the organic rankings with this product.

About a few weeks later, Yahoo actually included them back into the search index for free. The member said:

We have been miraculously reincluded and we are performing very well in the organic listings without paid inclusion!

As many people know, there is a gray line as to what quality truly is. Even within organizations, one person at Yahoo can review a site and consider it "good enough" to be included, whereas someone else can say it "just doesn't meet the requirements." Is this a case of that?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A High Rankings Forum member has run into a very strange issue on Yahoo. She has recently optimized her page and sees that it is updated in Yahoo, but not all elements seem to have been updated.

I just completed optimizing a site and was surprised to see it already cached on Yahoo (not google or MSN). When I click on "cached," I see the brand new content and complete optimized page. The title and description on the SERP, however, remains the same. Why would it have crawled and not change this pertinent information?

There are a few things that could have caused this problem:

The page could be pulling the title and description from the Yahoo directory which can be addressed by adding a NOYDIR directive.

Another possibility, though rare, is that Yahoo! could be pulling the DMOZ title and description.

And finally, it is possible that the data centers still have to synchronize:

It wouldn't surprise me at all of the caching is handled by a completely different set of servers from the datacenters that handle search and the display of title/snippet. If this is the case it should eventually sort itself out as all of their server farms catch up with your current offering.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forums.

WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums thread report a spike in activity with Yahoo Search's web crawler, Slurp.

People have noticed a large increase in page hits and bandwidth usage, caused by Yahoo! Slurp recently.

I run several sites and I have the same problem. In fact, if Y! were to send me 1 visitor for every 10 bot visits I would need a dedicated server to handle the traffic :o)

i used to get like 4-5 at a time, but in the last few days it jumped like 8-10 and today it was an all time high of about 18 yahoo bots at a time. i havent checked the total of the bots/day but its surely going to be a larger number today

There are enough posts for me to report this, but not enough to say this is happening to a large percentage of site owners.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Last night I frantically kept on updating my post named Yahoo's CEO, Terry Semel, To Be Replaced By Jerry Yang on Search Engine Land. The news came out in dribs and drabs from several different sources. Soon, it became clear, how the new Yahoo will be organized.

Terry Semel, Yahoo's CEO, has stepped aside to give stockholders and Yahoo users want they want - a new CEO. Yahoo's co-founder, Jerry Yang is taking over the CEO position, with Susan Decker is promoted to President from executive vice president. The statements are now all out and the Techmeme coverage is overwhelming.

Here is a roundup of the larger reports:
- Yahoo! Co-Founder Jerry Yang Named Chief Executive Officer is the press release
- My new job is Jerry Yang's blog post at the Yodel Anecdotal blog.
- Semel Steps Aside as Yahoo CEO from the Wall Street Journal is one of the original places to break the story.

Again, you can see all the coverage at Techmeme.

Danny clarified that Yahoo has no plans to bring in a new CEO. They believe Yang is the man for the job, since he understands Yahoo better than anyone else. I am for that.

My big question is how will this impact you guys, the SEOs and SEMs, in the short and long term. We have Panama, will Yahoo release more features for it soon? We have Yahoo! Search which has not really seen much excitement recently. Will Yahoo now begin to make things happen with both? Don't get me wrong, Panama is a huge undertaking and investment - and they have done a good job with that. But the Yahoo! Search side seems to be lagging behind.

I suspect Yahoo to quickly come out with some technology announcements to back the managerial changes that just happened. Or at least, I would hope Yahoo would back the management changes with technology changes. The question is, in which parts of the company will we see it?

There are many wishes from the SEM community in the forums. Most focused around the YPN product.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Cre8asite Forums, DigitalPoint Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yesterday was Father's Day and some of the search engines sported new logos for the special day.

Google had:

Dogpile had:

Yahoo had flash:

And here at the Search Engine Roundtable:

Ask.com did not have a logo for the day, which is not like them, but maybe it has to do with their new interface?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Earlier this week, we reported that Yahoo was experimenting with a blue header for their search interface. I just did a search at Yahoo and I see a purple header being tested.

Here is a screen capture:

Clicking on the "options" button on the right, opens a menu with "advanced search," "preferences," "advertising program," and "about this page." Those links also appear on the normal Yahoo! Search interface.

The Yahoo! Search home page remains to be the same white background and same user interface for me.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Has anyone seen Yahoo's new look? Jim Boykin, Karl Ribas, and folks on the DigitalPoint forums did. I can't reproduce it at the moment, so I'm assuming that they're rolling it out slowly, but I like it. The shiny blue bar is actually pretty cool.

So what do forum members think? "It looks nice!" says one. Jim's blog commenters also agree: "I think a change would be good," says another.

Only one gripe has been mentioned so far:

Although I think it looks nicer, it doesn’t display the number of results found in a search. That number is a very important number so I hope they’re working on including it.

Yeah, I think that needs to be there too. Otherwise, it's pretty and would be a welcome change.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

The Yahoo! Search Blog has announced that webmasters will now see Yahoo's spider, Yahoo! Slurp, returning a new domain name in your logs. The same IP addresses now render to the domain name crawl.yahoo.net and no longer return the domain name inktomisearch.com.

As of today, the transition is complete and all machines crawling as Slurp are now in crawl.yahoo.net. You can see this change in your web server logs, where the page accesses from inktomisearch.com are being fully replaced by crawl.yahoo.net contacts. Note that this does not cover other Yahoo! crawlers, such Yahoo! China, and other verticals, like Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Travel, etc., which have their own user-agent.

The good news: you don't have to change your robots.txt file over to prevent Yahoo! from crawling your site (if that's what you're aiming to do) because Yahoo says that the crawler user-agent is still Yahoo! Slurp and the IP addresses have not changed.

Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Last night the Y! Search blog announced a weather report indicating that the Yahoo index was updating overnight. Tim Mayer who usually lets us know about these updates told us to expect some changes most likely in response to spam reports and feedback from webmasters. The Y! Search Blog says:

We just rolled out a new search index last night. So, as usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index throughout this process. This update should be complete very soon.

I have spent the morning tracking down some forum threads on the recent update. While it may still be too soon to tell the effect of these changes. A thread on Digitalpoint Forums and WMW so far are the most active. From the forum members, most from my searching have indicated positive results from this update. Its seems like a big update from what I can tell. Some webmasters are seeing upward changes in their sites ranking and some are seeing no changes at all.

If you have been following our reports on Yahoo lately, Barry did an excellent post on websites ranking poorly in Yahoo but doing well in Google. There has been some good discussion lately about the differences between Yahoo and Google algorithms. Lately I have been getting a lot of emails from clients and friends about how to improve their search engine rankings in Yahoo. So what does Yahoo like? Barry profiled at the beginning of May new tags Yahoo has released to let them know about your most important content. There are also some good tips in this WebmasterWorld thread.

Continued discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, SEOChat

Cloaking is when a search bot is given one page of content, while a normal user is given another set of content.

If you go to http://autos.yahoo.com/used-cars/forsale.html and compare it with the Google Cache version, to me they look identical. So possibly, Yahoo! changed it. But in the screen captures, only the Google version had the "used cars" anchor text by every state break down. You can see the before and after at Agerhart.com.

It seems like Yahoo Autos is currently not cloaking at this moment.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Tim Mayer of Yahoo! has confirmed on May 22nd edition of The Daily Search Cast that Yahoo Autos has changed the page since this has been reported. So, Yahoo Autos was cloaking. FYI, this wasn't the first time Yahoo! was caught cloaking, there also were spotted using unethical search practices in July 2005.

Gabs spotted that Yahoo Search UK was showing zero results for the term fishing. Here is a screen capture:

But do notice the sponsored results.

But if you do the same search at the UK domain and not