Over the weekend there was coverage of a seemingly new feature on Yahoo search: mobile-app search. However that actually launched in the US in the middle of last year. The recent coverage was triggered by the launch of the app-search capability in the UK, which is new. The UI has been improved somewhat since I last looked at it. As an app search tool it's quite nice. Neither Google nor Bing offer anything comparable in their main search engines. Of course users can search directly for Android apps in the Android Market. Somewhat ironically one of the mobile apps that Yahoo discontinu [...]

Related Topics: Yahoo: Mobile & Go | Yahoo: Search

AllThingsD reported late yesterday that PayPal president Scott Thompson would likely be named CEO of Yahoo. It's now official; Yahoo just put out its formal press release announcing Thompson's appointment. In appointing Thompson, Yahoo is choosing a leader with a deeper technology and product background than prior CEO Carol Bartz who was abruptly terminated last September. In the interim Yahoo CFO Tim Morse has been serving as CEO. Not going to sell itself now There had been an expectation that Yahoo was going to sell itself or a significant minority stake to a private equity buyer or ano [...]

Related Topics: Top News | Yahoo: Business Issues | Yahoo: Employees | Yahoo: General | Yahoo: Mobile & Go | Yahoo: Partnerships | Yahoo: Search

Yahoo held its second now annual "Product Runway" event, mc'd by product chief Blake Irving. Irving was assisted by some younger executives from companies that Yahoo had acquired in the recent past. There were four announcements, lead by the formal unveiling of Livestand, Yahoo's long-promised tablet news reader application. It competes with Flipboard, CNN's Zite, AOL Editions, Taptu, Pulse and others. Here is a quick summary of the four announcements: Livestand: Described as a "personalized living magazine," it's a mix of Yahoo's own content and third party content. There will b [...]

Related Topics: Yahoo: Business Issues | Yahoo: Display Ads | Yahoo: General | Yahoo: Mobile & Go

Shashi Seth, SVP of Search & Marketplaces at Yahoo believes that mobile apps are like websites in the early days of the internet and will only continue to multiply just as websites have done -- seemingly exponentially. Regardless of whether the analogy is 100 percent accurate everyone agrees that app discovery has become a big problem. Among other things, it has given rise to an Amazon app store and several independent app-discovery sites like Chomp. Mobile (and increasingly desktop) apps are are an important new content category that Seth believes must be addressed by search. According [...]

Related Topics: Top News | Yahoo Search Direct | Yahoo: Mobile & Go | Yahoo: Search

I moderated the three mobile sessions on mobile at SMX West earlier this month: Mobile Search Ads, Location Services: The New Local Search? and Mobile Apps. A ton of great advice, stats and data came out of these sessions; you had to be fast to get it all. For those who weren't fast enough or weren't there I've pulled a few of what I think are the salient mobile data points and slides from these sessions. However this is only a partial summary. During two sessions, Microsoft shared these data points: 53% of queries have a local intent (previously discussed on this blog) 46% of quer [...]

Related Topics: Google: Mobile | Microsoft: Bing Mobile | Top News | Yahoo: Mobile & Go