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Yahoo Maintains its Competitive Spirit

CommunicateBetter — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:42:23 +0000

Last month, Microsoft and Yahoo finally struck a deal that will make these two internet super-powers a worthy competitor to Google. However, it isn’t necessarily what Microsoft had hoped for. Rather than a merger, the two have agreed to combine their search and advertising expertise to generate revenue through their respective search engines. Despite the news, an announcement made in a Monday press conference proves that Yahoo is gearing up to do battle with its old rival Google, as well as its future partner, Microsoft.

While Microsoft’s Bing will power the search efforts for both companies, Yahoo will work independently on its search engine user interface. According to internal sources, it plans to make this interface more efficient than the offerings of both Google and Microsoft.

Prabhakar Raghavan, Senior Vice President of Yahoo Labs and Search Strategy, said that the company is collaborating with Microsoft on the back-end, but will continue to complete on the front-end. He noted that crawling and indexing are currently of less importance than enhancing the web experience via the user interface. Raghavan and his colleagues emphasized that the company does not intend to abandon the field of search innovation entirely, making it clear that the Yahoo search engine will continue independent of Bing.

In late July, Microsoft and Yahoo agreed to a much anticipated partnership that will enable Microsoft Bing to power the Yahoo search site. Per the agreement, Microsoft will maintain the pay-per-click search advertising models while Google will sell advertising services of both companies to premium subscribers. Barring clearing from the United States Department of Justice, the agreement will equate to a 10-year partnership. Executives for both companies have stated that the implementation process could take as long as two years to complete. In the meantime, Yahoo is gauging the response of a new search results page. The new page is randomly available to worldwide internet users, offering features that allow them to filter queries to more efficiently refine search results. The company is also in the process of creating a more intelligent engine that automatically learns from previous searches and makes the according adjustments for the benefit of the user.

In addition the above enhancements, Yahoo is looking to feature more tools such as Search Assist, that allow users to refine their queries on the fly, as well as Search Pad, which helps users organize the information they find within search results. It also desires to let its users perform more tasks within the search engine interface by incorporating more information into results. One idea involves delivering this information through popular customer review sites like Yelp.

According to Larry Cornett, President of Yahoo Search Products and Design, all of these efforts and more are designed to create a Yahoo search engine that is more personally relevant than what has been seen in other search engines thus far. More importantly, it shows that Yahoo is still moving forward independently in light of the likely future partnership with Microsoft.

Yahoo Releases its Distribution of Hadoop

CommunicateBetter — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:02:07 +0000

Internet powerhouse Yahoo, just made its distribution of Hadoop available while hosting the Second Annual Hadoop Summit. Under the Apache Hadoop project, Hadoop is a distributed file system and parallel execution environment that allows users to process large amounts of data. Acting on requests from the user community, Yahoo decided to open up its investment in quality engineering for the benefit of the larger ecosystem and aid in the innovation of open collaborative research and development. Its distribution of Hadoop has been thoroughly tested and deployed on the world’s largest Hadoop clusters.

Justin Erenkrantz, Apache Software Foundation President, noted his excitement to see how the Apache Hadoop project has progressed over the last few years. He says the foundation is looking forward to witnessing the community’s growth accelerate with Yahoo’s continuous support and commitment to quality, factors that will ultimately attract more contributors to the Apache Hadoop project.

Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera, states that the general availability of Yahoo’s Hadoop source code will make its own distribution of Hadoop more robust and scalable. He says Cloudera will continue to work with Yahoo to implement the tried and tested source code into its commercial distribution. According to Olson, the Cloudera distribution of Hadoop is an enterprise-ready version complete with key tools, utilities, customer service and technical support, features designed to help enterprises deploy and maintain the Hadoop platform for larger scale data processing and management needs.

Considered one of the pioneers, Yahoo has led the way in development and is now the leading contributor to the Apache Hadoop project. Doug Cutting, Hadoop founder, joined Yahoo in 2006 and the company immediately began making significant investments in developing the project. Hadoop currently underpins several of Yahoo’s properties, including Yahoo Search, Yahoo mail and a variety of its content and advertising services. In Yahoo data centers, Hadoop runs on well over 25,000 servers and analyzes billions of web pages, petabytes of storage and billions of new records on a daily basis.

To demonstrate the community collaboration of the Hadoop project, Yahoo hosted the second annual Hadoop Summit on June 10 in Santa Clara, California. Co-sponsoring the event was Cloudera, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Sun Startup Essentials and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The event brought hundreds of members from the Hadoop user and developer communities together to learn and share ideas with each other. The Hadoop Summit focused on all the advancements made in the development and deployment of the project and its related technologies. It also touched on case studies of the applications being created and deployed on Hadoop as well as discussions on the platforms’ future directions.

Yahoo’s distribution of Hadoop is available via the Yahoo Developer Network. Cloudera’s distribution, which includes the Yahoo source code, is available at cloudera.com.

About Yahoo

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Yahoo is a globally renown internet brand and leading web hosting provider. The company is dedicated to empowering its community of customers, users, publishers, advertisers, and developers by establishing indispensable services based on trust and reliability. The Yahoo brand is currently one of the most trafficked internet destinations in the world.

Using a Generic Domain for SEO Purposes

CommunicateBetter — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:58:54 +0000

Although having a website is easier and more affordable than ever. However, actually getting your content in front of potential customers is becoming progressively difficult. This is mainly because so many businesses and industries are being established online. Regardless of what you specialize in, competition in the market is sure to be heavy. Unless you have a budget to put forth thousands of dollars on advertising and SEO web design, there is a possibility that your site will just sit collecting dust in cyberspace. Fortunately, there are numerous strategies that can get you one step closer to the traffic you desire. Believe it or not, your domain name plays one of the most significant roles in increasing search engine visibility and bringing in quality visitors. While some tend to go for flash or unique terms, this article will explain why you may want to keep your domain name simple with generic keywords.

Why a Generic Domain?

When registering a domain name equipped with generic keywords, you stand the chance to rank higher and faster than some of the most well designed and optimized sites. This is a very crucial aspect of SEO. Although search engines literally return hundreds to thousands of results, you want to find yourself at the head of the class instead of the last few pages or even somewhere in the middle. Let’s be honest – how many pages do you sift through when looking for products or services on Google? Probably not many. Most web surfers don’t make it past the first two pages. This means your web pages needed to be listed somewhere in the top 20 in order to be viewed. One of the best ways to achieve this ranking is with a good, generic domain name.

How it Works

The average search engine is more like an advanced variation of the Yellow Pages. You can typically find the exact product or service you’re looking for in the phone book underneath a generic name. On the web, search engines like Yahoo function in a similar manner, delivering search engine results based on sites with URLs and content relevant to what is being requested. For example, if your business “Computer Company” sells laptop computers, you can dramatically increase search engine traffic by using the generic term “laptop” in your domain name rather than the name of your business. This simple strategy could put you light years ahead of competitors who focused on the trendier names.

Some organizations pay thousands of dollars on advertising but the internet has evolved tremendously. With this evolution have come a variety of new ways to attract the increasing number of potential buyers. There is a lot that goes into site promotion and to be honest, nothing is ever guaranteed. While investing in quality advertising can prove beneficial, site promotion all starts with choosing a good domain name. Savvy webmasters and businesses have learned that when it comes to securing their presence and gaining a competitive edge, the generic domain name is one of the best ways to go.

Options for Valuable Search Engine Submission

CommunicateBetter — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:16:51 +0000

Your website is finally done and now you are ready to bring in some quality traffic. There is certainly no shortage of promotional techniques and search engine optimization is one of the most effective. SEO consists of numerous elements but this article will focus on the first step – search engine submission.

The Importance of Search Engines

A search engine is like the local Yellow Pages book. Whereas the Yellow Pages only contains listings in your area, a search engine offers world wide reach. Each uses robots or spiders that crawl the web in search of pages to index in their database. Search engines are driven by keywords as this is what a user types in the box to find the content they are looking for. While keyword implementation and link popularity play a major role in getting your site to rank well, manually submitting your site is equally important.

Google and Yahoo

Google and Yahoo are easily the two most significant search engines on the web. Although Google is arguably the most popular, Yahoo is often deemed as the best. When performing identical searches in both engines, you will find that Yahoo gives you a lot of results Google looks over. Be that as it may, both should be at the top of your list for search engine submission. If your site isn’t listed here, you are missing out on a great deal of traffic.

MSN

A relatively new option, MSN is a search engine developed by Microsoft. Though not as popular as Google and Yahoo, getting your site listed in MSN is equally important as it has become the third highest ranked search engine on the market. With this search engine, you can either submit your site via Live Search or Submit Express, both of which are trusted links through MSN.

Lycos

Lycos is a combination of a search engine and online directory, quite similar to Yahoo. It normally takes about four weeks to have your site listed which all depends on when you made the submission. The Lycos search engine spiders typically operate every four weeks, so if you submit just before the next scheduled crawl, there is a chance that your site could get listed fairly quickly.

Looksmart

Looksmart is a search engine that specializes in commercial advertising. This search engine is quickly gaining ground as more webmasters realize the benefit of online advertising. The downside to Looksmart is that submitting your site will cost you a pretty penny along with a lengthy waiting period. There is also an express service but this of course, is priced much higher. Non-profit organizations can submit their sites on Looksmart for free.

Northern Light

The Northern Light search engine is becoming increasingly popular as it indexes all new site submissions in about three to four weeks. This search engine is extremely easy to use and submitting to it will cost you nothing.

When submitting to a search engine, make sure the description of your site is longer than 24 words. Avoid using HTML tags as well as any descriptions that can be viewed as marketing terms. A submission will not guarantee you top ranking on the front page of Google, but is that first critical step to getting some decent exposure for your site.

The Importance of SEM

CommunicateBetter — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:46:32 +0000

There are many ways to go about promoting your site and SEM is one of the most effective. Search engine marketing or SEM, refers to the marketing of a website to improve its ranking in the search engines. It also describes purchasing paid listings among other search engine related activities. When embarking upon an SEM campaign, it is important to first understand the benefits of optimization and then employ techniques that will bring prospects to your site. Just as when getting browsers to enter your store in the real world, the goal is the same here – convert those visitors into customers.

Why SEM?

Today’s internet and World Wide Web see more consumers turning to search engines for the products and services and they seek. If you are out to establish a strong base of customers and strengthen your bottom line, making friends with the search engines is the way to go. SEM is a proven technique and has worked wonders for business owners looking to increase their online visibility via the SERPs. This method involves a combination of various techniques and when used effectively, the consumers who are after your products or services will find you much easier.

A recent study shows that nearly 90% of all website traffic is generated from major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. This is the very reason why almost every online business owner is currently so engulfed with optimization and marketing their sites for search engine traffic. As we mentioned before, SEM covers a broad category of techniques and the most important of all is optimization.

Below we have provided details on two of the most commonly used methods of SEM.

SEO

More commonly known as SEO, search engine optimization describes the act of creating web pages that appeal to the search engines. It generally involves building link popularity and most importantly, implementing relative keywords potential visitors are most likely to type into a search engine. These keywords are to be inserted into the body of the web page as well as title tags and meta tags. SEO can be so effective that other SEM techniques might not even be necessary. Although every method is not required for a successful SEM campaign, SEO is one you can’t do without it.

PPC

Because achieving high rankings in a search engine is no easy task, some rely on Pay Per Click campaigns for high profile placements. This is the type of model where you pay a predetermined fee when a user either clicks or visits an advertisement. PPC is an SEM technique that focuses on targeted audiences and particularly, generating sales.

The key to SEO and SEM in general, is knowing how web surfers go about searching for products and services they are interested in. Keep in mind that they rarely use industry jargon so you have to think like your audience in order to attract them. This is why SEO experts stress the importance of keyword research. Whether its genuine SEO, PPC or other methods, keywords are the basis of successful SEM.

Domain Keys in the Fight Against Phishing

CommunicateBetter — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 19:33:45 +0000

Anybody with an email address is likely to have countless amounts of phishing messages in their inbox, and they may not even realize it. This type of threat usually doesn’t come at you with the attention-grabbing headlines of advertising spam or the unbelievable plots attached to the fraudulent messages carrying Nigerian scams. In many cases, a phishing message doesn’t look much like spam at all, even though it is a well crafted plan to steal your money. Believe it or not, a large number of people have fallen victim to this clever scam so it is important that you know how to recognize and avoid it.

What is Phishing?

Phishing is a sophisticated scam based on social networking. Unlike other attacks where intruders rely on vulnerabilities in a server or website application, these scam artists would prefer that the system remain intact. Instead, they look for vulnerabilities in the actual person themselves, hoping they can find someone who is trusting enough to believe the alarming message in their inbox and respond or follow the provided link.

There are essentially two types of phishing. One approach involves a scam artist sending you an email and purporting as a representative of an institution you do business with. This could be any type of company from a bank to someone pretending to be affiliated with PayPal or eBay. They will inform you that there is problem with your existing account and that your login credentials are needed to fix it.

The second approach is similar yet distinct from the method above. A phony representative attempts to alarm you by stating that there is a problem with your account. However, they don’t ask for you to respond with your login credentials, but simply follow the provided link so they can either verify your personal information or correct the problem. After clicking the link, you are not redirected to an official online banking or PayPal website, yet a rogue site that looks strikingly similar, so much that distinguishing it from the real deal might be difficult. Upon entering the requested information, you are essentially handing over the keys to your valuable assets and possibly your identity.

So, what role will DomainKeys play in the fight against phishing? As a product owned by Yahoo and integrated into its web-based mail system, the technology will help to protect you against email scams in the following ways:

Website owners register their Domain Name Servers with the DomainKeys system from which emails are required to be transmitted from a registered server.

DomainKeys incorporates an additional header to message, identifying the sender’s domain name server to verify where the message originated.

The message is then verified by the web-based mail system which analyzes the header to ensure that it originates from where it claims. If the header isn’t validated, the message is automatically sent to a spam folder.

Yahoo has been working to push DomainKeys as a standard for web-based anti-phishing for sometime now. With Gmail recently picking up the technology, it’s very likely that it will become standardized in the very near future. Unfortunately, internet criminals are quite persistent and seem to find a way around the most efficient security mechanisms. Whether you use a free web-based mail system by Yahoo, Gmail or through your own website, the best advice is to never respond to a suspicious email or click on any links. If a message appears legitimate, contact the company personally and speak with an official representative. This will determine if someone was trying to bait you with a phishing scam.

Generating Traffic with Search Engines

CommunicateBetter — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:34:26 +0000

There are several ways to go about marketing your site and generating traffic. However, some of these methods are quite risky and simply not worth the time and effort they require. Marketing companies will attempt to sell you on everything from bulk email campaigns and pop-up advertisements to link farms and banner impressions. While these tools have proven to be effective, most of them will not be well received by your niche market. For instance, many people find mass mailings (spam) and pop-ups so intrusive and annoying that they stay away from anyone that uses them. These methods certainly are not the best way to make impact on your audience and just could be a huge waste of money. The hit or miss aspect of common marketing techniques is all the more reason to consider the search engines for bringing in traffic.

One of the best ways to gain a significant amount of traffic is to base your efforts on relevance, the driving factor of every online search engine. A number of different studies show that an estimated 80% to 90% of first time visitors find a website via search engine. These customers are more likely to lead to sales and conversions because they are already coming in with some level of interest.

On the web, first impressions are everything and you typically do not get a second chance to win over your visitors. Chances are, someone who endured a bad experience on your site will never come back while the exact opposite could lead you to success. If your site is user-friendly and offers the content they are looking for, the visitor will return whether they make an on the spot purchase or not.

Search engines like Google and Yahoo can provide you with a steady flow of targeted visitors. And unlike other marketing techniques, these benefits will do not have to cost you a single penny. The only thing a search engine wants from you is good, clean relevant content that matches up with what web surfers are looking for. Give the roaming spiders what they want so they can do what they are programmed to. If you are able to produce this content on your site, you will be rewarded with quality traffic.

Last Words

Rather than viewing your website simply as a virtual business card, think of it as a piece of real estate that increases in value just like residential property. Research a few keywords that your niche audience is most likely to enter into a search engine to find you. Clearly explain to visitors what is is that you do and how they can benefit. Network with others in the industry to build yourself a fair amount of quality links. Make sure your website is rich with content and optimized for the search engine. All of this will enable you to generate traffic naturally. When designing for both your visitors and the search engines, your rankings will inevitably increase and shower you with additional traffic.