Yahoo has added a set of refinements to its video search engine that will help music lovers find videos more quickly.

A video search for [U2] shows the new refinements in action: On the left side of the screen are new options to drill down to see U2 videos related to specific albums or specific songs.

You can click any album or song to see the video results that match the refinement without losing the context of your original search. It looks and works similar to the travel photo tours refinement that Yahoo added to image search earlier this year.

One more note: on the image above, you’ll see a box labeled “U2 – Twitter Videos.” Although we don’t recall any specific announcement of this feature, Yahoo tells us it’s not new and not related to the real-time search tests that Yahoo is planning.

Yesterday at the CTIA mobile conference, Yahoo Mobile SVP David Ko announced a range of upgrades to its mobile homepage. The new homepage was launched this past April. According to the statement that Yahoo put out yesterday, the homepage has been optimized for 1,900 devices. Video is also a bigger part of the experience now on smartphones.

Changes and upgrades for smartphones include the following:

• Dynamically updated content with pagination – without using additional screen real estate or refreshing, users are able to access a wealth of content. For example, the ‘Today’ module now surfaces ten of the leading stories from around the Web and gives users immediate access to 48 of the top news, business, sports and entertainment articles directly to consumers’ fingertips.
• An enhanced RSS reader –   that now supports photos with captions, and adds the ability to scroll through more headlines from favorite feeds without having to refresh content.
• Enhanced mobile video integration – with one click consumers can watch streaming video including the Yahoo! produced Tech Ticker – a rundown of the latest financial news, and Prime Time in No Time – a recap of last night’s TV shows, as well as news, entertainment and sports videos from the Associated Press.
• Enhanced movie results – movie posters now show you exactly what’s playing at a theatre near you, and with a few simple clicks you can watch the trailer, read reviews from Yahoo! and Rotten Tomatoes, and even buy tickets from participating theatres – all directly from your mobile device.

Yahoo’s homepage is one of the most visited sites in mobile in the US and worldwide, although Yahoo’s mobile search share lags Google — as it does on the PC.

The Yahoo site is extremely well done and offers a high degree of customization with “My Favorites” for those who sign in. And by signing in Yahoo can target ads in mobile based on PC activity as well.

Our love affair with celebrity continues, as evidenced by news today from Yahoo that it served about five million streams of the Michael Jackson Memorial ceremony. That makes it the most streamed event in Yahoo’s history, surpassing the inauguration of President Obama in January, when Yahoo served 1.8 million streams.

While watching the event online, many viewers were also searching for information about the people involved. People not watching a live stream were looking for videos of what they missed. Yahoo says it saw spikes in searches for

• Elvis Presley’s funeral
• the casket company that made Michael Jackson’s casket
• Jackson’s daughter, Paris, and video of her speaking
• Brooke Shields and video of her eulogy
• names such as Pastor Luscious Smith, Reverend Al Sharpton, and Shaheen Jafargholi, along with other Jackson family members and friends

Most of the searches listed on Google Trends are also Jackson-related, and many mirror the types of queries Yahoo reported. A Google News spokesperson says search activity today was “significant, but not to the same extent we experienced the day he passed.”

Meanwhile, a Facebook spokesperson says there was plenty of interest in the Jackson ceremony there, too, but not as much as during the Obama inauguration. There were about 800,000 status updates related to the live coverage of today’s memorial, far less than the 1.8 million status updates on inauguration day with the word “Obama.” Facebook points out, though, that the inauguration was widely publicized for months – much longer than the Michael Jackson ceremony today.

Google remains the dominant player in the online video space, but Hulu is on the rise. It’s now the number three video property according to the latest comScore numbers out today.

According to comScore, Hulu has passed Yahoo properties and moved into the third spot with 2.6% of all videos viewed during March. Yahoo dropped to fourth with 2.3 million videos watched on its sites. Google properties (primarily YouTube) are still miles ahead of the competition with almost 41% of all videos viewed during the month.

ComScore estimates that almost 150 million Internet users watched an average of 97 videos during March, totaling almost 5.5 hours per person. The average Google/YouTube viewer watched 59 videos.

After disabling new uploads in December, Yahoo will formally kill off Jumpcut in June.

More than just a video upload-and-watch site, Jumpcut allowed users to share videos and photos, creating essentially a library of “stock” clips and images that any user could include in his/her own videos. It also offered online video creation and editing tools. Jumpcut was a somewhat novel concept that apparently didn’t catch on enough — at least not enough to survive CEO Carol Bartz’s promise to reorganize and refocus the company.

TechCrunch has posted the email sent out to Jumpcut users with news of the site’s impending demise:

Dear Jumpcut user,

After careful consideration, we will be officially closing the Jumpcut.com site on June 15, 2009. This was a difficult decision to make, but it’s part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo!

Very soon, we’ll be releasing a software utility that will allow you to download the movies you created on Jumpcut to your computer. We’ll send instructions to this email address when the download utility is available.

Once you download your movies, you may choose to upload them to another site such as Flickr, which now allows video uploads. You can find out more here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/video/

Thanks for your understanding and thanks for being a part of Jumpcut.

The Jumpcut Team

Yahoo bought Jumpcut in 2007.

Google continues to dominate the online video market in much the same way it dominates search. Google properties set a record in October with more than 100 million video viewers — 99.5 million of whom watched videos on YouTube. Those are some of the numbers issued this afternoon by comScore from its Video Metrix service.

Google’s video market share represents more than two-thirds of the estimated online video watching audience for the month. As the chart below shows, Fox Interactive and Yahoo ranked second and third, respectively, in audience share.

As you’d expect, YouTube also dominates the rankings when counting videos viewed. comScore estimates that YouTube served more than 5.4 billion videos in October — almost 40% of all videos watched during the month. Fox ranks second with a paltry 3.8% of videos viewed.

The video market overall continues to grow. ComScore says we watched 13.5 billion videos online in October, a 45% jump over last year. The average video viewer watched a jaw-dropping 92 videos during the month of October. There are more interesting numbers in the full comScore release.

Search has historically been seen as a direct response vehicle and the notion that search is a branding medium has traditionally been met with considerable skepticism by search marketers, albeit somewhat less recently. In an effort to be provocative in moderating the “branding and search” panel at SMX West last month, I said, “Search is much more a branding medium than anything else.”

When I asked how many people agreed in the audience, only a few hands went up. James Lamberti of comScore then presented evidence to argue that search was in fact a powerful branding medium because of its reach, how it’s used by consumers in early stages of purchase behavior, the brand and generic category keywords used in queries, and so on.

Yet if one could persuasively argue that search wasn’t truly a branding medium before, it will become one in a much more obvious way in the very near future. Witness Barry’s post on Yahoo’s effort to put branded Honda advertising at the top of search results. Here’s the ad as it appears on Yahoo:

And here’s a video that plays over the search results when clicked:

The other interesting angle here is that TV drives the search behavior (through a prompt to “Shop Honda”) then provides for a full range of user responses and actions depending on that particular consumer’s place in the so-called purchase cycle: find offers, locate a dealer, request a quote (lead-gen).

Through Yahoo search, Honda can track the efficacy of the TV campaign (via query volume) and all the other actions the user takes, right down to the point of sale potentially. There is also a range of pricing/ad models that may be possible here: CPM, CPC, and even CPA, depending on the user action, within the same ad unit.

Google is also bringing display ads in the form of video into search. The video ads on Google will be like video in Universal Search, activated by the users and potentially “behind” a plus box.

These ads show the future of search marketing for big brands, as the engines acclimate users to seeing graphical and video ads in search results. Universal or blended search is paving the way. As Google’s Marissa Mayer said when Universal Search launched:

Well we don’t have anything to announce on that today. I do think this opens the door for the introduction of richer media into the search results page. We are now going to understand how users interact with that. And as Alan always likes to say search is about finding the best answer, not just the best URL or the best textual snippet.

For us ads are answers as well. Searching ads is just as hard as searching the Web, as searching images. And so I was hoping that we could bring some of these same advances in terms of the richness of media to ads.

Brands and agencies will welcome these ad offerings, consumers will likely respond to them if they’re not too intrusive, and ad networks should fear them because they will be far more effective for brands in the long run.

A curious thing is happening: Yahoo seems to be executing in the midst of the chaos of uncertainty surrounding its future. Speaking at an IAB event yesterday, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said the Microsoft takeover bid has been “a galvanizing event for everyone at Yahoo.”

Indeed, in the past three or so weeks since the initial Microsoft bid, Yahoo has:

• Launched Yahoo Buzz

• Introduced Yahoo Search Monkey
• Acquired Maven Networks
• Introduced Yahoo Live
• Previewed an impressive new unified advertising platform (Apex)
• Upgraded and expanded Yahoo Video (video is also coming to Flickr)
• Introduced an open-source infrastructure (Hadoop) for its search index

The company also laid off 1,000 employees.

Yahoo President Sue Decker said at the same IAB event that the Microsoft bid “accelerated conversations that were out there,” in reference to News Corp., AOL, and Google partnership/merger conversations.

Meanwhile, last Friday Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson again made the case for a Micro-Hoo combination and sought to allay concerns about layoffs and duplication at the combined company. But some shareholders and others are starting to question whether Microsoft should continue to pursue Yahoo. Microsoft’s shares have lost close to 15 percent since the bid was announced.

On the other side, Yahoo now faces multiple suits from shareholders for not accepting the Microsoft bid and for proposing a plan to offer “golden parachutes” for Yahoo employees, a kind of “poison pill” for Microsoft in the event of a takeover.

Pundits and others have argued that Yang has not had sufficient resolve and took too long to execute on the professed strategy of making Yahoo the internet’s “consumer starting point” as well as an open platform. However, the company seems to have found resolve and focus amid the crisis. Indeed, it often takes crisis to motivate action.

Before the crisis eases and things calm down, however, the intensity of the drama will only increase. Microsoft’s now hostile takeover effort and proxy fight requires it to install a new board, which is sympathetic to the bid. It will accordingly nominate a new slate of potential directors on March 13. It needs the backing of a majority of shareholders to elect the board.

I’m guessing that a range of institutional shareholders has informally told Microsoft they will support the proxy fight or Microsoft wouldn’t have gone down that path. I’m speculating, however.

It’s terribly ironic that it took Microsoft’s bid to, in effect, wake Yahoo up. And while nobody can predict the outcome with certainty, which has grown more hazy in recent weeks, Yahoo for the time being seems to be back on course.

The Yahoo Video Blog announced that Yahoo Video has undergone some improvements. The improvements include:

• A wider, 16:9, video player
• Additional content including music, movies, TV, news, sports, and more
• The max file size is now 150 megabytes (Google and YouTube are 100MB, I believe)
• Added networks, playlists, and related videos to your selected video
• You can now share playlists by embeddable playlists under your embeddable video; an example can be seen over here
• More detailed profile pages

For a full list of changes, see the Yahoo Video Blog announcement.

Techmeme is all abuzz with news of the Yahoo Live launch. I’m thinking Yahoo’s doing online video? Again? But weren’t they closing Yahoo Video? No, that was Yahoo Podcasts – it’s hard to keep track of the closures. But still, what’s special about Live? Then I hit the official Yahoo blog post about it and it all became clear (and potentially cool). Yahoo Live lets you broadcast live video. From the post:

Broadcast the concert you’re at. Webcast your own live DJ set. Lifecast. Build your own live video speed dating application. We’ve created a website and an API that lets you do all these things and many more.

Ready to get going? Apparently, plenty were — and the "experimental" site crashed. It remains down at the moment, but check out the posts below for some screenshots:

• Yahoo (sort of) launches a livestreaming service, Yahoo Live | Tech news blog - CNET News.com, News.com
• Yahoo Launches Live – A Live Streaming Video Service, TechCrunch

You can also find more related coverage on Techmeme, plus stay tuned to the new Yahoo Live Blog.