Is Yahoo Search Dead? Hardly – New Features Coming Soon
Just barely over one year ago, we discussed how a string of layoffs could mean the end of Yahoo search. However, it now appears that Marissa Mayer’s leadership has changed all that, as Yahoo is redoubling its efforts by adding new upgrades, tools, and features to its search engine.
Without going into specifics, senior vice president of Yahoo search Laurie Mann said that the company has “some really cool things in the pipeline,” expected to be released to consumers over the next few months, according to a report by Bloomberg.
Some With Microsoft, Some Without
The news comes hot on the heels of Yahoo’s announcement that they’d be continuing their search partnership with Microsoft, in which Microsoft guarantees Yahoo minimum ad revenues, for another year. Along those lines, Yahoo has announced that some of their new features are being developed with the help of Microsoft, while others will be exclusive to Yahoo and not Bing. It seems likely, then, that Yahoo is positioning itself to break away from its search partnership with Microsoft on April 1, 2014, when the partnership is now set to expire.
Following these announcements, Yahoo saw a 1.3% increase in its stock price, which is up a whopping 67% since Marissa Mayer joined the company as CEO (Mayer was among the most important executives at Google prior to this).
Google Looming
Regardless of what’s happening with Microsoft at any given moment, Yahoo’s biggest challenge remains the virtually insurmountable market share advantage held by Google, which handled 67% of searches conducted in the U.S. in March. Bing captured about 17%, while Yahoo came up short at just 12%.
What’s Yahoo’s plan? Aside from rolling out the aforementioned new features in coming months, Yahoo says its focusing hard on mobile by hiring fresh talent with innovative ideas about how people search on tablets and smartphones. Will it be enough to topple Google? Almost certainly not, but a concerted effort by both Microsoft and Yahoo could conceivably slow down Google’s overall momentum in 2013.
