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 discontinued in a recent purge of mobile products was the Yahoo mobile equivalent of app search for the PC (AppSpot). Here’s what it looked like when it launched in June, 2011:

Other mobile apps recently shuttered by Yahoo include the following:

• Yahoo Meme (iPad and iPhone)
• Yahoo Mim (iPad)
• Yahoo Answers (Android)
• Yahoo AppSpot (Android and iPhone)
• Yahoo Deals (iPhone)
• Yahoo Finance (BlackBerry)
• Yahoo Movies (Android)
• Yahoo News (Android)
• Yahoo Shopping (iPhone)
• Yahoo Sketch-a-Search (iPad and iPhone)

The apps will continue to function but won’t be “supported” or updated, according to a Yahoo statement.

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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 another company (perhaps even Microsoft). However the appointment of Thompson would seem to contradict that scenario. (Update: Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock said in the Thompson press release that the company was still considering a sale of assets.)

Thompson was PayPal’s CTO prior to being named president. Before that he worked for a technology subsidiary of Visa. And before Visa he was CIO of Barclays Global Investors. The Yahoo board undoubtedly likes Thompson’s resume, which offers a diverse mix of skills and capabilities.

PayPal has been eBay’s most successful business unit of late, outshining its parent. Thompson’s departure from PayPal will be something of a blow but probably only a temporary one to the payments platform, which is seeking to establish a leadership position in mobile.

The larger and more important question is whether Thompson has the capacity to bring new vigor and focus to Yahoo, the company and the brand — both of which badly need innovation and energy. Another question is whether he’ll seek to bring in his own team or do any sort of reorganization. Numerous personnel changes and reorgs over the past few years have been damaging to Yahoo morale and momentum.

Confronting a range of challenges

Thompson and a renewed focus on product could help stabilize Yahoo. But what we might call “structural” changes in the online ad market (including the rise of Facebook and Google in display) have perhaps irrevocably eroded Yahoo’s once dominant leadership in its bread and butter segment: display advertising. Thompson is also going to be inheriting a search deal that has underperformed and failed to live up to revenue expectations for Yahoo.

What Thompson is not is an advertising or media executive. However current Yahoo EVPs Blake Irving and Ross Levinsohn can more than compensate in those areas, provided that they’re retained or stay, as the case may be.

Mobile is another area that Yahoo badly needs to focus on. While it had an early leadership position in mobile product development and advertising that has been entirely erased by Google in the past two years. Thompson’s knowledge of and experience with the mobile market may also be extremely helpful to Yahoo.

Does he have the right mix of skills?

I had earlier written that Yahoo needed to find its own version of Steve Jobs. That may be too much too ask. But perhaps in Thompson Yahoo will get a fresh start with a new CEO who has the right mix of knowledge, skills and temperament to pull the company out of its protracted slide.

Below is a video from the 2009 Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco at which Thompson spoke about PayPal and mobile payments.

Postscript: Yahoo has officially confirmed Thompson’s appointment as CEO. Yahoo Board Chairman Roy Bostock also indicated in the press release that the company is still considering a sale of some of its assets:

“Scott’s primary focus will be on the core business, and as CEO and director, he will work closely with the Board as we continue the strategic review process to identify the best approaches for the Company and its shareholders. As part of this process, Yahoo! is considering a wide range of opportunities for the Company’s business, as well as specific investments or dispositions of assets,” added Bostock.

Postscript II: Now a couple of reactions from financial analysts who cover Yahoo. They’re consistent, seeing Thompson as a positive hire but expressing some concern about his lack of experience with digital advertising.

Mark Mahaney, Citi:

We Are Marginally Positive On YHOO’s CEO Hire – Mr. Thompson was with PayPal for the past five years – he has been CEO of PayPal since 2008 and before that he was SVP and CTO of PayPal . . . We believe Mr. Thompson has strong technical and organizational skills (like Carol Bartz) and should bring that rigor to Yahoo!. His track record at PayPal was excellent. However, we are somewhat concerned that he does not have strong media/advertising experience, which we believe Yahoo! needs, given the structural issues surrounding the company’s Search and Display initiatives. And by selecting Mr. Thompson, Yahoo! is explicitly pursuing a Growth strategy, whereas we believe a Value strategy might be more appropriate.

Ben Schachter, Macquarie Capital (USA):

We’ve always been impressed with how Scott Thompson led PayPal, and believe that his experience and track record of execution rank him amongst the Internet sector’s more capable executives. YHOO should benefit from Thomspon’s leadership, but we must admit that we find the appointment somewhat surprising given Thompson’s background as a specialist in the online payments/technology space. YHOO has been in the midst of an identity crisis, unsure of its place on the Internet. We look forward to seeing how Scott defines Yahoo, but at this very early stage that vision remains unclear. All else equal, we would have preferred to see the Board hire a candidate with deeper experience in the online advertising/media space, but Thompson could surprise by defining and executing YHOO’s vision in an unexpected way.

Prior to tonight’s new display, a search for “apple recipes” would include the standard algorithmic results (i.e., 10 blue links) along with a small shortcut at the top of the search results pointing searchers to recipes on shine.yahoo.com, Yahoo’s lifestyle content site for women.

Now, the Yahoo.com search results offer a much richer experience.

The new content includes (1) a slider with top-rated recipes from AllRecipes.com and other sources; (2) a Filter by Ingredient option; (3) the obligatory Facebook sharing tool; (4) new tabs to filter search results based on their calorie count and preparation time; (5) a new “Recipes” tab under the search box that leads to the new Yahoo Recipe Search interface, which offers additional search and filtering options like “meal type,” “occasion” and “rating.” (There’s also a new, dedicated URL for Yahoo Recipe Search at recipes.search.yahoo.com.)

Yahoo has made similar changes for shopping-related searches. There’s already been a dedicated “Shopping” tab at the top of the search results, but the shopping experience is richer and similar to what’s being offered for recipes. Rather than just showing five or 10 products and a link into Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo shows a slider and new “Deals” and “Buying Guide” tabs.

There’s a comparison tool that lets searchers check out up to five items from within the search results page, and filtering options as shown above in the screenshot.

Lastly, and not holiday-related — Yahoo has also tweaked its search results for entertainment queries. Tabs for “Videos” and “Tweets” are still available, but the interface has been changed and looks more like the tabs seen above on recipe and shopping searches.

The new Yahoo search experiences should be available now on Yahoo.com.

Microsoft said, the “European roll out is scheduled to begin with the UK, Ireland and France in the second quarter of 2012.”

Yahoo and Microsoft have already transitioned the search ad technology in the U.S. and Canada, as well as some other regions. But the transition scheduled slowed as revenue figures did not meet estimates and advertiser expectations were poor.

Yahoo and Microsoft has completed the organic transition less than a month ago. The only migration left is the organic Korea region and much of the paid search and publisher transition.

To stay up to date on the UK transition, watch searchalliance.com/uk for updates.

Related Stories:

• Yahoo Completes Global Organic Transition To Bing (Except Korea)
• Yahoo Asia & More European Properties Transitioned To Bing Powered Results
• Yahoo UK & Others Switching To Bing Organic Results August 3rd
• Yahoo Begins Testing Bing Powered Results This Month
• Yahoo Search Advertisers Can Now Begin To Migrate Accounts To Microsoft adCenter
• Yahoo-Microsoft Organic Transition Happening, Site Explorer, Search Monkey Holding For Now
• What’s New With Bing & Yahoo Search Alliance
• Official: Yahoo’s Results Now Come From Bing

The same is true for Yahoo. If you say, “Search Yahoo for Wilson Phillips” or “Search Yahoo for Google Earnings” you see these results:

Who knew? Well, if you launch Siri, click the little info button, then select the Web Search option, you’ll find an example listed at the end of how you can ask “Bing Alicia Keys,” it turns out. But most people probably haven’t done this.

Of course if you change your search settings to make Yahoo or Bing the default, Siri will search either of them instead of Google. In that scenario, you could still get to Google by saying “Search Google . . .”

Siri thus emerges as a very efficient way to compare search results or to use a second engine if you don’t like what you get the first time.

If you do a search on any Yahoo powered site via your desktop or mobile device, with the exception from within Korea, the search results will be powered by Bing. Why not Korea? Because there is a three-way migration for that between Yahoo, Microsoft and Daum. They expect this transition to be completed by the end of the year.

The first Yahoo portal to be switched over was U.S. and Canada back in August 2010. Since then, many other countries were moved over in batches until now where everything is now moved over to Bing, with the exception of Korea. The ads in the U.S. and Canada and some other countries are powered by Microsoft adCenter but the ads in other countries are still powered by Yahoo’s search ad platform. The completed migration is only talking about the free, algorithmic, also known as organic, search results.

Yahoo’s Kartik Ramakrishnan, VP of Search Engineering, summarized the complexities involved:

• We had to cutover web, image and video search experiences from Yahoo!’s search technology backend to Bing’s algorithmic backend for 40-plus markets, across desktop and mobile devices. In addition to Yahoo’s owned and operated search experiences, we also had to cut over hundreds of our syndication partners in more than 50 markets, while ensuring a smooth transition for users of our wildly popular Yahoo! Search BOSS service.
• Cutting over to the Bing backend was not simply a matter of technical integration through the Bing API. We worked with Microsoft to ensure that Bing’s algorithmic quality in each of these markets was on par or better than Yahoo!’s quality. Wherever we found quality gaps, we worked collaboratively with our counterparts at Bing to provide data driven assessments of quality gaps to help us close the gaps quickly. Only when both teams had established that the quality bar in a market was met, did we green light the cutover.
• A very important design principle was to ensure availability of all key user experience elements of the Yahoo! search experience post-cutover. This meant that we had to perform a comprehensive analysis of product features per market, assess which of those would require support from the Bing platform, and which features Yahoo! would have to continue to develop and invest in.
• Creating a migration path to Bing Webmaster tools for users of Yahoo! Site Explorer, while continuing to support Site Explorer for international users during the transition period proved challenging. We had to confirm Bing could handle Yahoo’s capacity across multiple global datacenters, including new ones that were brought online to serve the needs of the Search Alliance. The fact that all the cutovers went remarkably smoothly and were essentially non-events from an operational perspective is a testament to the thorough job both teams did.
• For all our major markets, we ran comprehensive bucket tests to compare the Yahoo! search experience going against the Yahoo! and Bing backends. We monitored key user experience metrics to ensure that the product experience post cutover would be on par or better for our customers. We had to put in place support and customer care processes that ensured user concerns and content issues were handled appropriately between our companies, working through policy differences to ensure the right outcome for all stakeholders.

Related Stories:

• Yahoo Asia & More European Properties Transitioned To Bing Powered Results
• Yahoo UK & Others Switching To Bing Organic Results August 3rd
• Yahoo Begins Testing Bing Powered Results This Month
• Yahoo Search Advertisers Can Now Begin To Migrate Accounts To Microsoft adCenter
• Yahoo-Microsoft Organic Transition Happening, Site Explorer, Search Monkey Holding For Now
• What’s New With Bing & Yahoo Search Alliance
• Official: Yahoo’s Results Now Come From Bing

This was first spotted by GFI Labs, which showed how certain download-related searches always presented Yahoo’s download site, downloads.yahoo.com, at the top of the results page, ahead of the official website.

That alone isn’t unusual. Google and Bing both often show their own properties at the top of search results. Yahoo does, too — remember our Yahoo Search Direct Alphabet article from earlier this year, which showed how 21 of the 26 letters of the alphabet led to a Yahoo property in Yahoo’s new Search Direct tool.

In my testing, not all download-related searches led to Yahoo Downloads first; it didn’t show up at all, for example, on searches like “download adobe acrobat” and “download chrome.”

But, as GFI reports (using a search for a program called Teamviewer), when Yahoo does show its own portal first, there’s more going on after the download happens from there:

If the user runs the download from this page, they will be presented with an offer for the Yahoo toolbar and then either Shop to Win or Social Ribbons add-on. After the user accepts or declines these offers, the installer then downloads the actual Teamviewer installer from Tucows to the user’s desktop and and prompts the user to run it.

GFI has a screenshot of the extra download “offers” that Yahoo is including. Here’s the offer for the Yahoo toolbar:

GFI says the other download offers are affiliate/charity related, but Yahoo offers few details about how much money is donated, nor where the money goes.

This appears to be a PC-only concern. I’ve just downloaded a Mac-based program from Yahoo Downloads and, after launching the downloaded file, was not presented with any extra offers from Yahoo.

And, needless to say, if searchers skip the Yahoo Downloads result and get the software from the official site, they also won’t get hit with extra download offers from Yahoo, either.

There’s more discussion on Techmeme.

Specifically, Asian Yahoo search users in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam will now get Bing powered results. In addition, they also migrated over more European countries such as Greece, Poland, Romania, Switzerland (German, French and Italian languages) and Turkey. In addition to the transition of Yahoo UK to Bing back in August, which included Yahoo UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

Yahoo also said Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Russia, the Netherlands, Sweden, plus several countries in MENA (in Arabic language) have been moved over and of course all the previous announcements.

There is no word on the paid search aspect of these new countries as of yet.

Remember, Yahoo transitioned to both Bing powered organic and paid results in the US a while back.

Related Services:

• Yahoo UK & Others Switching To Bing Organic Results August 3rd
• Yahoo Begins Testing Bing Powered Results This Month
• Yahoo Search Advertisers Can Now Begin To Migrate Accounts To Microsoft adCenter
• Yahoo-Microsoft Organic Transition Happening, Site Explorer, Search Monkey Holding For Now
• What’s New With Bing & Yahoo Search Alliance
• Official: Yahoo’s Results Now Come From Bing

The offer a somewhat cleaner design, with tabs showing related content and navigational filters that allow sorting by date and related searches.

All the changes discussed in the Yahoo Blog post aren’t live for me but they appear to be generally incremental or modest improvements. Most of the changes appear designed to provide suggestions for related searches and generate additional search volume accordingly.

Last month comScore reported that Yahoo’s US market share had grown by 0.2 percent. It’s basically “stable” or “stuck,” depending on your preference.

Bartz’s legacy is cost containment; and her chief “accomplishment” is the Microsoft search deal, which Wall Street wanted but which sent lots of engineering talent out the door. While the search alliance has generally been good for Microsoft it has not yielded the anticipated dividends (literally and figuratively) for Yahoo.

So if you have seen a spike in your Bing Webmaster Tools traffic charts, this is the reason why. You should see your impressions and clicks data spike up, while the click through rate numbers may fluctuate from the norm as well. Since Bing now fully powering Yahoo search’s organic results, virtually in most geographic locations now, Bing has decided to integrate their data in the tool.

There are many webmasters who would love an option to filter this data by search provider, i.e. see Bing vs Yahoo data but currently it does not seem possible.

Related Stories:

• Yahoo UK & Others Switching To Bing Organic Results August 3rd
• Yahoo-Microsoft Organic Transition Happening, Site Explorer, Search Monkey Holding For Now
• All New Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools
• Bing Webmaster Tools Enables HTML5 Interface
• Yahoo-Microsoft Organic Transition Happening, Site Explorer, Search Monkey Holding For Now
• Bing’s “Honey Badger” – An Upgrade To Webmaster Tools