Yahoo!

CEO of Yahoo!, Carol Bartz, has urged investors to show more patience, pointing to the slow turnaround of Apple as being indicative of what might transpire.

Yahoo! is celebrating its 15th anniversary and Bartz is accordingly taking a long view with regards to the success of the company. Apple was in the doldrums for quite some time and even after the return of its co-founder, Steve Jobs, in 1997, it still had to wait until the iPod in 2001 to see significant success.

“I know people want to see magic things happen (at Yahoo). The magic things happening are deep inside our little system here,” said Bartz.

Despite a drop in earnings and revenue, Yahoo! stock has risen since Bartz came aboard just over a yaer ago, gaining around 30 per cent. Similarly, after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the stock soared by 50 per cent in a similar period and are now worth 37 times as much as they did when he returned.

Bartz is on a four year contract which has unfortunately coincided with a recession. Current ploys to resuscitate the brand include attempts to persuade users to spend more time on Yahoo! web pages, thus increasing the value of those pages for advertisers.

Yahoo! has followed in the footsteps of Google and Bing in offering Twitter results for a more ‘real-time’ user experience. Yahoo! has now begun indexing tweets in an effort to offer increased freshness on its results pages.

Interestingly, the Yahoo! deal goes further than the Google and Bing ones. It is not yet known how it will be implemented, but the deal will mean that users can use Twitter from other Yahoo! products as well, publishing tweets without visiting Twitter itself.

Twitter feeds will also be accessible within Yahoo! Mail, through the Yahoo! homepage and on other Yahoo! sites such as Yahoo! Finance.

One of the co-founders of Twitter, Biz Stone, said:

“The information in one single tweet can travel light-years farther with this Yahoo! integration. Tweets in more places brings relevance where and when you need it most.”

Users should be seeing Twitter results in amongst ordinary Yahoo! search results already, but they will have to wait a while longer for the other developments to be put into place.

The financial details of the deal are as yet unknown.

The road is looking increasingly clear for Microsoft and Yahoo! to join forces to take on Google after European regulators approved the partnership. The 10-year deal is now said to be underway after it was deemed that it would not harm consumers, the US already having approved the deal.

The plan is for Microsoft’s search technology to underpin Yahoo! with revenue shared between them. Yahoo! chief exec, Carol Bartz, says that this will allow her company to focus on products and services rather than developing technology.

It should also ensure stiffer competition for Google, who are still way ahead in terms of market share. Microsoft chief exec, Steve Ballmer, said:

“I believe that together, Microsoft and Yahoo will promote more choice, better value and greater innovation to our customers as well as to our advertisers and publishers.”

Yahoo! has struggled in recent years, but remains the second largest search engine. In the US, it provides results for 17.5 per cent of searches, while Bing is third , with 10 per cent.

Internationally, Google’s dominance is even more obvious, as it provides 90 per cent of all searches, with Yahoo! claiming a mere 4 per cent and Bing 3.4 per cent.

A new partnership between Yahoo! and Nectar, the loyalty card company, will see online advertising targeted to users based on information gathered from their High Street spending.

Nectar have a huge database and can provide reams of information about particular shoppers’ historical spending habits, highlighting whether they have bought certain products in the past or are loyal to particular brands. This information will then be linked to their Yahoo! username, allowing more targeted advertising across the Yahoo! network.

The benefits do not end there. Being as Nectar’s database will continue to monitor purchases, the efficacy of these targeted adverts can be better measured, allowing advertisers to measure their return on investment.

Known as “Customer Connect” Yahoo! will be hoping the deal helps attract new advertisers who have previously been reluctant to appreciate the value of online advertising. Yahoo! is not new to this kind of venture, having struck a similar deal in the US with Nielsen.

Speaking on behalf of Yahoo!, UK managing director, Mark Rabe, said:

“For the first time UK advertisers will have a simple way to track offline sales from online advertising campaigns.”

One company which has already embraced this development is Cadbury.

Despite a falling market share, Yahoo! has reiterated that it is committed to search. This comes on the back of the deal in which Microsoft’s Bing will be used for searches on Yahoo! websites.

Shashi Seth, from the search engine, said:

“Yahoo has been in search, is in search and will continue to be in search.”

Seth says that the company will continue to innovate and bring new products to the search market.

A few of these were demonstrated at a recent press conference, Yahoo! describing them as being representative of the next generation of search.

One innovation has been labelled ‘sketch-a-search’ with which smartphone users can draw a ring on a map with their finger and find restaurants or other businesses within that area.

Perhaps in the long term these measures will strengthen Yahoo!’s position, but for now the search engine is down by three per cent in the US market to 17 per cent of searches in the last 12 months.

Google has maintained its position with 65 per cent of search queries being made through it, while Bing has risen to capture 11 per cent of the market.