Yahoo to go for weeklong shutdown
In its bid to boost it’s cost saving efforts, Yahoo! announced that the company;’s offices shall remain shut from Christmas to New Year.
This cost-cutting move ends probably the worst year in Yahoo!’s history as the company saw its revenue declining for the first time since 2001.
This shall be the first time in the history of Yahoo! that the company wants most of its 13,200 employees to utilize their unpaid leave during the holidays. During the Dec 25th to Jan 1st period, onlt the employees performing certain essential duties will be working.
The Sunnyvale, California, based internet giant earlier eliminated about 2,000 jobs and shed various other expenses since September 2008 to sail through the worst economic slowdown since the WW II.
Not only this, several other Silicon Valley companies traditionally close most of their offices during the holidays.
Australia, Canada approve Yahoo!-Microsoft deal
Australian and Canadian competition authorities have approved the Internet search and advertising partnership between Yahoo! and Microsoft as per the companies’ announcement on Tuesday.
In a joint statement released by the two companies, it was announced, “Microsoft and Yahoo! have been notified that Australian and Canadian authorities have separately concluded their reviews and have no objections to our proposed search agreement.”
The statement further added, “We continue to believe that this deal will create a true, competitive alternative in the marketplace that will benefit consumers, advertisers and publishers. We remain hopeful that the agreement will close in early 2010.”
The agreement however, remains subject to review by US anti-trust regulators.
Google, Yahoo zero in on Internet ‘freedom’ bill
Leading search engine company Google Inc. and several other Internet companies including Yahoo! have zeroed in on a flexible effort by a Republican lawmaker to pass the ‘freedom bill’. The bill challenges their ability to take a different approach to operating in ‘repressive’ foreign countries.
Google Inc., Yahoo1 and also Microsoft Corp. including several others have been focusing on lobbying efforts on the bill, touted as the ‘Global Online Freedom Act of 2009.’
This curbs the freedom of the companies which have been trying to do business in countries such as China where widespread and expanding Internet access is subject to censorship and political repression. Google specially has struggled to compete in China, lagging behind the local competitor Baidu in terms of Internet search market.
Bing gains search market share, nears 10 pc
Good news for Microsoft as the software giant’s attempt to gain internet search market got a new boost on Tuesday!
Microsoft’s new Internet search engine Bing increased its share of the US search market in October, close to almost 10 per cent!
This was the fifth month in a row of modest gains in search share for Bing, which Microsoft unveiled in June accompanied by a 100-million-dollar advertising campaign in a bid to challenge search king Google Inc.
Bing’s share of the lucrative search and advertising market increased by 0.5 per cent in October to 9.9 per cent. Yahoo!, Microsoft’s search partner, saw its market share decline 0.8 per cent in October to 18.0 percent.
Meanwhile, Google also added half-a-point in October to reach 65.4 per cent. Other minor search engines like, Ask.com was unchanged at 3.9 per cent while AOL.com lost 0.1 per cent to 2.9 per cent.
Yahoo! shuts down GeoCities
On Tuesday, Yahoo! closed its free web hosting service called GeoCities. GeoCities is known to be one of the company’s most speculated purchase for over three billion dollars that too at the height of the dot-com boom.
In a message at the GeoCities’ websitwe, the California based company announced, “We have enjoyed hosting websites created by Yahoo! users all over the world, and we’re proud of the community you’ve built.”
It further added, “However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways.”
Yahoo! Also announced that the internet search giant is discontinuing its GeoCities service and instead the users can set up their new online homes at its paid web hosting service. This gives them an introductory offer of USD 5 only for the first one year.
The move to shut down GeoCities comes a week after Yahoo! reported that aggressive cost-cutting efforts from the company has helped it triple its net profit despite a 12 per cent decline in revenue in the third quarter.
The internet giant’s net profit saw a rise of more than 244 per cent in the quarter to USD 186 million from 54 million dollars as compared to the figures a year ago.
WOWD, the real-time search engine
With an aim to be identified as the Skype for search, the beta version of WOWD, the Internet’s newest search engine, was launched last week at the 2009 Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
WOWD aims to distinguish itself from the popular mainstream search engines like Google and Yahoo! by identifying the most popular sites in real-time and hence wooing the internet search audience.
WOWD is a deliberate play on the word Crowd as it aims to differ from the rest by focusing on new trends, news, and popular topics and pages on the Internet.
In a method little similar to Digg, the internet users download WOWD browser application, and then every page visited by them is nominated for inclusion on the search engine’s results page.
The WOWD browser application is available for the Mac, Windows, and Linux.
The home page of WOWD offers three different tabs, Hot List, Search, and My Pages. The Hot List is available to everyone and results by popularity. Results are constantly updated giving you an update on the sites being visited by other users.
Carl Icahn resigns from Yahoo board!
Billionaire investor Carl Icahn on Saturday, resigned from his position on the board of Yahoo!, saying the US Internet giant no longer needed an ‘activist’ director like him! He was believed to be one of the largest shareholders in the company.
In his resignation letter to the board, Icahn announced, “I don’t believe that it is necessary at this time to have an activist on the board of Yahoo! and currently, my attention is focused on other matters.”
He further added, “As a result, I do not presently have the time that is necessary to devote to the business and affairs of Yahoo! required if a board member is to fulfill his fiduciary duties to the shareholders.”
Susan Gordon, the investor’s spokesperson said that the man is focusing on a number of other companies. Icahn, on Monday, offered a USD six billion loan to ailing lending giant CIT Group.
Towards the end of august, he also sold about 12.7 million shares in Yahoo!, cutting his stake in the company a month after it formed an Internet search partnership with software giant Microsoft.
Google News mistakes Jackson queries for attack
After the shocking and sudden reports on Michael Jackson’s death, a flurry of search queries for the King of the Pop led Google News, the news aggregator of Web search giant Google, to believe it was under an attack, Google said at its official blog on Friday.
The Internet giant said on Friday that as “millions and millions” of people across the globe sent in search and news queries for the pop star on Thursday, Google hesitated a bit initially believing that it was under an automated virus attack, rating the “hotness” of Jackson-related searches as “volcanic.”
“The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack,” Google said. The official blog post also added, “As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a ‘We’re sorry’ page before finding the articles they were looking for.”
As the reports about the hospitalization and death of the pop star, millions of shocked fans across the globe couldn’t believe the news and searched for reliable sources on the internet.
Amongst the other web-based services who suffered a lowdown were the popular micro-blogging service Twitter, web portal AOL, and Yahoo!
Twitter suffered a slowdown as millions of shocked fans and even celebrities across the globe expressed their shock and emotions on the sudden development. AOL’s AIM instant messaging service was down for about 40 minutes.
Yahoo! said it received five times its normal traffic and its front page story “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital” was its “highest clicking story” ever with 800,000 clicks within 10 minutes.
Microsoft makes gains with Bing
Going by the market figures of the last week, Google’s arch rival, Microsoft’s newly launched search engine Bing won more market share according to the data released on Wednesday. However, the new kid on the block is still miles way from Google Inc and Yahoo Inc.
Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer labeled this as a good start for their company.
“We have had some very good initial response,” Ballmer said at a conference in Detroit. “I don’t want to over-set expectations. We are going to have to be tenacious and keep up the pace of innovation over a long period of time,” he added.
According to data released by industry tracker comScore on Wednesday, for the June 8-12 week, Microsoft grabbed 12.1 per cent of U.S. Internet searches. This accounts for a 11.3 per cent growth from the June 1-5 period, the week in which the new search engine was launched.
On the monthly basis, Google top scored with 64.2 per cent of U.S. searches in April, followed by Yahoo! with 20.4 per cent and then Microsoft with only 8.2 percent
Yahoo to shut Yahoo 360
One of the popular Yahoo service, Yahoo 360 is now finally officially closing on July 13. According to the earlier reports, Yahoo! was contemplating to shut the service last year itself, however it never happened. The announcement came at the official blog of Yahoo!
The blog post says, “Over the past two years there has been a lot of discussion about the closure of Yahoo! 360° and the transition to our new profiles experience that we’ve had in the works. Today, we’re able to firmly say that on July 13, 2009 Yahoo! 360° will be closing down and you’ll be asked to move into your new profile on Yahoo!, by July 12, 2009.”
Launched in March 2005, Yahoo 360 was the social network/blogging service from Yahoo!, the second largest search engine company after Google.
Unlike many other contemporaries, this service from Yahoo! couldn’t gain much popularity. Yahoo 360 had 13.9 million worldwide unique visitors in April, however.
A couple of years earlier, in October 2007, Yahoo! announced its plans to shut the service. However in April 2008, the company reiterated the plan.
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