Search Engines and Algorithms: Optimizing for Yahoo! Search and AltaVista - What's New and Hot with Yahoo!
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What’s New & Hot with Yahoo!
Like any of the major search engines, Yahoo is constantly adding new features to their search services. Utilizing these extra features help to enhance search for the user.
Blog search
Yahoo Inc. said in mid-October, 2005, that it will begin featuring the work of self-published Web bloggers side by side with the work of professional journalists, leveling distinctions between the two. While I’ve reserved most of my information in this area for another article, it is sufficient to say that specific blog searches to supplement news searches come as great news to the blogger and SEO alike.
Podcast search
Yahoo! Podcasts offers a comprehensive directory of podcast series and individual shows from across the Web, complete with detailed search results, most popular and highest rated lists, editorial picks, and a full collection of tools you can use. These community tools include ratings, reviews, and the ability to tag audio content, or view the tags that other people add.
Video search
The Video Search service allows you to search the Internet for video clips. While Video Search has been around for a little while, it now incorporates the use of RSS so a user can create a feed URL of Yahoo video content based on a search and subscribe to it in iTunes 6, automatically downloading free movies every day to one’s media collection.
Desktop search
In late September, 2005, Yahoo introduced its Desktop search utility. Yahoo’s Desktop search offers a simple and convenient way to search on the Web for more information about any topic, word or phrase in your desktop files, email, and documents, as well as instant messages. You can even find information related to your desktop content. Some of the features of this new utility are:
The ability to search as fast as you can type
Previewing file capability
Link content you are viewing with web results
The ability to search email attachments regardless of the type of file
Selectively indexing only the content you choose, so as to ensure privacy
In The Works
Some of the new things that are coming from Yahoo include Travel Trip Planner (currently in beta), which saves all of your trip ideas into a personalized and printable travel guide. Other new things to watch for from Yahoo include Instant Search, Mobile Shopping, Audio Search, Search Subscriptions, and more. You can preview all the new projects Yahoo has in the works at Yahoo Next (next.yahoo.com).
Yahoo News, one of the world's most popular Internet media destinations, has begun testing an expanded news search system that includes not only news stories and blogs but also user-contributed photos and related Web links. Yahoo said its move to “...combine professionally edited news alongside the work of grassroots commentators promises to enrich the sources of information on breaking news events.”
I think we can expect great things from Yahoo in the near future with the social and concept search engines, and even in the areas of semantic search, as research continues in the area of latent semantic analysis. We’ll look more at semantic search in another article in this series.
Next: Altavista >>
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