Yahoo and Microsoft have finalized their agreement to install Microsoft as the exclusive search provider for Yahoo's network of sites, the companies announced Friday.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer first approved a search deal in July, but the matter took a little extra time to complete.
(Credit: Yahoo/Microsoft)The deal, first reached in July, still needs to be approved by the U.S. government before it becomes final. But the companies said in October that they needed more time to complete the deal due to the "complex nature of this transaction," and Friday's announcement is likely the result of hundreds of hours of painstaking review from expensive lawyers.
At least company executives didn't have to rack up the frequent-flier miles to finalize this year; they signed it virtually, with Microsoft's Qi Lu and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz representing their respective companies on the licensing agreement and Ballmer and Bartz inking the definitive agreement, according to sources familiar with the deal.
Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft will provide search technology to Yahoo for up to 10 years, also gaining access to Yahoo's search technology assets and several hundred employees. It will then pay Yahoo a significant portion of the ad revenue generated alongside those searches.
A Yahoo representative declined to comment on the specifics of what held up the final approval of the deal. Both parties said they still expect the deal to become final in early 2010, although the government is sure to take a long hard look.
Ina Fried contributed to this report.
Yahoo is bringing Facebook into just about all of its Web sites, allowing users to update their Facebook status and share news items with friends right from the Yahoo page.
The company announced the integration of Facebook Connect across several key Yahoo Web sites including Mail, News, Sports, and Finance. The idea is to drive even more readers to Yahoo's network of sites--the second largest in the U.S.--by making it easier for them to share things they like with their Facebook friends, some of whom may not have seen the Yahoo item otherwise.
Yahoo already offers a few hooks into Facebook, but this partnership strengthens the relationship between the two sites. The integration will take awhile, however; Yahoo said not to expect the process to begin until the first half of next year.
It foreshadowed the Facebook Connect integration at an event in August, when Yahoo announced social-networking features within properties such as Mail and Messenger. Those updates were restricted to friends within the Yahoo network, however. Facebook and Twitter are where the social-networking junkies congregate.
The death of Michael Jackson in June launched a frenzy of Web activity and propelled the late pop star to the top of the search charts for 2009.
That's the word from Google, Yahoo, and Bing, all of which have revealed their popular search terms for the past year.
It's not too shocking to see Jackson leading the searches for the year. Following the pop star's death in June, Akamai found that worldwide Web traffic had surged 11 percent over normal levels. Even Google--which in the initial going thought the Jackson-related traffic was an attack of some sort--was briefly sent staggering.
Searches for Michael Jackson songs spiked in late June when news broke about the pop star's death.
(Credit: Google)According to Google's Zeitgeist findings, "Michael Jackson" was the "fastest rising" worldwide search term of 2009. In the U.S., "Michael Jackson" placed second behind "Twitter." Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, in a blog post also pointed to an up-and-coming music sensation:
As millions of fans said goodbye to the King of Pop, Michael Jackson led the list of our top 10 fastest rising queries across the globe. And a new star was born, too--quirky pop singer Lady Gaga became a search sensation the world over. In addition to appearing on many regional fastest-rising search term lists, from the Czech Republic to Switzerland and Kenya to the United Kingdom, Lady Gaga also landed in the #9 spot on the global fastest rising list.
On the social side, Google monitored whose Twitter accounts were the most searched for. According to the company, Miley Cyrus' Twitter account was the most sought after, followed by those of Lance Armstrong and Taylor Swift. Khloe Kardashian's marriage to basketball player Lamar Odom was the most-Googled wedding of the year.
"Michael Jackson" was the top Yahoo search term for the year. He was followed by a who's who (and a what's what) of the U.S. entertainment scene. "Twilight" was the second most-popular search term, followed by wrestling organization "WWE," starlet "Megan Fox," singer "Britney Spears," and manga series "Naruto." Filling out the top 10 were "American Idol," "Kim Kardashian," "Nascar," and "Runescape."
Microsoft's Bing, which debuted in late May, had similar results. Once again, "Michael Jackson" was the top "trending topic," followed by "Twitter" and "swine flu." "Stock market" and "Farrah Fawcett" rounded out Bing's top five.
Of course, 2009 was also marked by continued concern over the state of the economy. According to Yahoo, "coupons," "unemployment," and "stimulus plan" were the most-numerous queries related to the economy. By contrast, Google's most-searched economy-related terms were "crisis," "cash for clunkers," and "Iceland."
Google also followed queries related to celebrity deaths in 2009. Users searched for "Michael Jackson" the most, followed by "Billy Mays" and "Steve McNair." Yahoo's data revealed that Michael Jackson's death was the most-searched term, but unlike Google's data, the pop star was followed by "Farrah Fawcett" and "Patrick Swayze."
See also:
• Google Zeitgeist 2009
• Yahoo Year in Review 2009
• Top Bing searches in 2009
Yahoo is adding more context to news searches, bringing photos, videos, and even tweets into its search results page.
Searchers on Yahoo--who are dwindling--will find new results for newsy events Thursday, when Yahoo launches new tabs on the Yahoo News Shortcut. You've long been able to find links to news stories about a given search query through the shortcut, but you can now find other ways of telling the story with the new tabs, said Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer products for Yahoo Search.
Yahoo may be close to finalizing a deal to outsource the back end of its search business to Microsoft, but it insists that it's still a competitive search company with its decision to focus its research and development on new ways of presenting search results. The new shortcut is one such improvement, although one that's not all that different from what can be found on Google and Bing.
The main difference is that Yahoo will now provide the option of browsing images or tweets related to a given query without having to leave the search results page to click over to the Yahoo News section, Cornett said. Bing surfaces photos and video in its News section but not necessarily in its main search results page, and Google takes a similar approach.
Yahoo is using Twitter's public API to surface tweets, which are also run through a Yahoo algorithm to determine relevancy, Cornett said, declining to provide details on exactly how that works. Yahoo has not secured access to the "firehose" of tweets, whereas Microsoft and Google just signed deals for access to that data as part of their own bid to index tweets.
(Credit:
Comscore)
Yahoo continues to lose share in the search market, as Google and Microsoft pick up the difference.
Comscore's measurement of the U.S. search market in October shows that Google--as usual--still dominates the search landscape. It now watches 65.4 percent of all searches pass through its servers, up 0.5 market share points from September of this year.
Yahoo, on the other hand, is going in the other direction as new friend Microsoft reaps the benefits. Yahoo lost 0.8 market share points in October compared to September, now down to 18 percent of the market. It has been in a steady decline this year, as Microsoft has gained share with the relaunch of Bing: Microsoft almost cracked the 10 percent barrier in October with 9.9 percent of all searches, gaining 0.5 percentage points compared to September.
Total searches grew 3 percent from September to October. Searches done through Google increased 5 percent and those done through Microsoft increased 8 percent. Yahoo searches decreased by 1 percent over the same period.
Yahoo will pull support for Go on January 12, 2010.
On Wednesday, Yahoo will tell some mobile phone owners that it's pulling the plug on the mobile app called Yahoo Go (video). Yahoo Go was Yahoo's all-in-one native app of Yahoo services for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Symbian phones, since January 2006. It gathers together Yahoo's services around a rotating carousel motif, the application's start page.
Yahoo Go, which first emerged at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2006, was full of content--but information was buried and the app wasn't intuitive to customize. Yahoo pretty much halted work after January 2008 with Yahoo Go 3.0 beta, and began concentrating more on its Web portal. Yahoo's mobile-optimized Web site, m.yahoo.com, contains Yahoo Go's core features, like search, weather lookups, and RSS feeds for information like headline news and stocks. Yahoo's revamped mobile site also lets you check e-mail, send IMs, and track status updates on social networks.
Killing Yahoo Go is in line with Yahoo's mobile strategy, says Yahoo's global head of mobile product marketing, Adam Taggart. "In the past 18 months, browser quality has been increasing at an accelerated rate. We've doubled down on our mobile Web strategy."
While Yahoo pours resources into streamlining its mobile Web presence, it also continues to release Yahoo Mobile applications for some mobile platforms, like the iPhone. On top of Yahoo Mobile are more focused standalone applications. iPhone owners interested in stocks can download the Yahoo Finance app, for example. Sports enthusiasts have Yahoo Fantasy Football.
Support for Yahoo Go officially stops on January 12. On Wednesday, active users will see an e-mail or an update notice pushed onto the app itself that will inform them of the shut-down, and urge them to start using m.yahoo.com instead. Visiting the mobile site from some phone models will prompt a download for a compatible native app. Yahoo Mobile still isn't perfect, and it can also suffer from information overload. However, active Yahoo Go users will find that their content is intact, albeit somewhat rearranged.
Yahoo Messenger 10 beta is no more. At least not the "beta" part. This week, Yahoo gave the version 10 beta its stamp of approval, pulling away the "beta" marker and replacing Yahoo Messenger 9 with Yahoo Messenger 10 on Yahoo's download page.
For those using version 9 or below, Yahoo Messenger 10 adds a slew of design enhancements that draw out the chat app's social-networking side and video calls. If you're already using Yahoo Messenger 10 beta, you should be prompted to download a fresh version of Yahoo Messenger 10, but you won't see new goodies pop up since the beta was first introduced last August.
Check out screenshots of the Yahoo Messenger 10 features in this gallery before you download--the images are for the 10 beta, but they still apply. Pay close attention to our installation advice before you download; choose "Custom," not the default, if you'd rather avoid all of Yahoo's installation "perks," like the Yahoo Toolbar.
If you're not ready to make the jump, there's no hurry yet. Yahoo will currently continue to support Yahoo Messenger 9.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has abruptly canceled her scheduled keynote speech at CES, arguably the biggest event on the technology calendar.
Tech Trader Daily noticed Tuesday that Bartz's name had disappeared from the list of keynote speakers for the 2010 CES, almost a month to the day that the Consumer Electronics Association announced her plans to attend the show. A representative of the CEA later confirmed that Bartz was no longer in the mix, and announced plans to have Qualcomm's Paul Jacobs keynote the event.
A Yahoo representative cited "changes in her calendar" that would prevent Bartz from showing up at CES but declined to provide any further details. Bartz was recently forced to cancel appearances on Yahoo's third-quarter earnings call and an interview at the Web 2.0 conference due to the flu.
Betting that the benefits of the move will outweigh the risks, Yahoo has released the source code underlying in-house software called Traffic Server that can speed up Web site operations.
The software works by moving some data and operations closer on the Internet to the people trying using those services. Yahoo released it as an "incubator" project under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation, a seasoned organization for managing open-source projects and also the site that houses the Hadoop open-source project Yahoo favors for large-scale data-processing challenges.
Shelton Shugar, Yahoo's senior vice president of cloud computing, plans to announce the move at the Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., on Tuesday in a keynote speech, but the software actually arrived at Apache last week.
Shelton Shugar, Yahoo's senior vice president of cloud computing
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)"We've donated Traffic Server to Apache because we think it's a great piece of code, and we want to build a community around that in the same manner we built a community out of Hadoop," Shugar said in an interview.
Traffic Server is a battle-hardened package with more than 200,000 lines of C++ code. Yahoo originally got the software through its acquisition of Inktomi earlier this decade, and it's been using it ever since. Today, the software delivers 30 billion Web objects and 400 terabytes of data each day.
And Yahoo can rightly be proud of Traffic Server's performance: that comes from a surprisingly small number of Yahoo servers--between 100 and 150, said Chuck Neerdaels, vice president of data services at Yahoo. The software is set up particularly to run multiple tasks at the same time, a design well-suited to today's servers with multicore, multithreaded processors.
Source code is what humans write in a higher-level programming language; only after it's been translated into binary machine code can a computer actually run that program. When associated with an open-source project, this software is available for anyone to see, modify, and distribute, in contrast to the locked-down world of proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows. So in effect, Yahoo is allowing others not only to use Traffic Server for their own ends, but also to modify it--for example, by taking advantage of its ability at to accept plug-ins that can adapt it for different tasks.
Giving away the farm?
So isn't there a risk that Yahoo is giving away some pretty important technology that's central to its business? Plenty of start-ups today are trying to grow to Yahoo's scale, and many of them are competitors.
Some Yahoo rival might very well gain as a result, but on balance, the company thinks that it'll come out ahead. For one thing, Traffic Server in isolation is not as powerful as Traffic Server woven into Yahoo's computing fabric, the company argues.
"What we're giving up is a generic building block. What makes it really interesting at Yahoo is how we've connected it with other things to make a bigger service," Neerdaels said. As for Yahoo's major rivals: "We suspect our larger competitors already have some solution they're happy with."
Yahoo expects a number of benefits from broader development and use of Traffic Server.
"We think a lot of folks can benefit from this, and by raising the tide, we think we can benefit as well," Shugar said.
For one thing, making Traffic Server open-source software will mean that people will grow familiar in its use, making it easier for Yahoo to hire engineers who already are up to speed.
"By virtue of basing services on open-source software, we attract people who want to work on open source. They like it, and they like the idea of it. It's a skill they can take with them from one place to another," Shugar added.
For another, Yahoo can benefit from others adapting the software to a broader range of uses, he said.
Gaining influence among developers
There are intangible benefits, as well, when it comes to recognition among programmers, whose influence in some ways makes them the digital elite. Microsoft long ago learned that much of its power comes from developer allies, and Google is trying to put that lesson to good use as well by releasing many open-source projects--Google Chrome being one recent example.
Yahoo isn't in the business of selling technology to others in the manner of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google App Engine. But having solid technology is essential to Yahoo. While it's willing to sell its search business and engineering skills to Microsoft, it still needs in-house expertise to power its many Web properties and to reduce its operating costs.
Here, Traffic Server is important. For example, one area where Yahoo uses Traffic Server was at Yahoo Sports for handling scores. A regular Web server sends out the Web page to a person's browser, but Traffic Server handles the JavaScript technology that periodically refreshes the contents of a scoreboard element on that page.
It's only a "trickle" of data, but at Yahoo's scale, that can be some pretty heavy work. "When they moved to using the Traffic Server front end, they shaved something like 200 machines off their back end because session management was more efficient," Neerdaels said.
Another part of Yahoo operations retrofitted with the software is Yahoo Mail, he said. Traffic Server can be used to process the cookie text files on a person's browser to figure out whether that person can be logged in automatically or the person needs to authenticate anew. It also can route traffic appropriately when, for example, a person who is "homed" to Yahoo's servers in India visits the site while in the United States.
Traffic Server also manages a lot of more nuts-and-bolts tasks. For example, it can cache Web data closer to browsers so the original Web servers that house the data aren't as overtaxed. And it can store a Web address stored in the Domain Name System to speed up network speeds.
What's it good for?
Some of these chores can be handled by existing software, such as Squid, which is already open source. But Yahoo is on a roll with its open-source work, as the company seeks to advance its internal cloud-computing infrastructure. Expect more to come.
"As various pieces of our cloud get to a point of maturity, we will open-source specific pieces," Shugar said. Future candidates include Yahoo's foundation for hosting its Web applications on a virtualized, more flexible foundation, and its Sherpa and Mobstor services for storing data.
Winning open-source allies can be difficult, and Neerdaels said it takes an engineer a good six months to fully comprehend all Traffic Server's code, so immediate gains beyond fostering goodwill are unlikely.
But in the long run, Yahoo's program could pay significant dividends. Building a series of significant open-source packages could lead to a Yahoo infrastructure that's high-power but more standard than custom-made.
It's not every day that large, significant software packages arrive on the Net in open-source form--much less a series of them that are increasingly relevant to a competitive market of large-scale Web sites.
In this case, Yahoo's gift may indeed become Yahoo's gain.
Yahoo's current headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Yahoo is apparently thinking about making a run for the border: the Sunnyvale border, that is.
Marketwatch reports that Yahoo is finally preparing plans for a parcel of land it acquired three years ago in Santa Clara, Calif., a few exits south on U.S. 101 of its current headquarters in Sunnyvale. The land has apparently sat vacant ever since Yahoo bought it in 2006 in hopes of expanding, which, of course, didn't exactly work out given Yahoo's financial performance over that time and the economic downturn.
It's not clear whether Yahoo wants to move the executive offices or just expand into that location. But the proposal submitted to Santa Clara officials involves a 13-building complex covering 3 million square feet, which means it's probably not going to be used as a satellite office for obscure divisions of the company.
It seems Yahoo is feeling confident enough about its business prospects to consider taking on a building project. The company released a statement about its plans for Santa Clara.
"Yahoo purchased 42.5 acres of land in Santa Clara in July 2006. We submitted initial plans to the City of Santa Clara to redevelop the property in August 2008 and plans are currently with the City to procure entitlements for developing the land. We are taking the proper steps to secure approval for the development of the land. We continue to evaluate our real estate portfolio on a worldwide basis to ensure it best supports our business."
