Future Searches

Yahoo’s Job Cuts, Google’s New Hires

Yahoo Inc said Tuesday it is laying off one percent of its workforce, or some 130 employees, in the latest job cuts. News of Yahoo’s latest layoffs come hours before the Web media company is due to report fourth-quarter financial results after Tuesday’s market close.

“The latest cuts are part of the company’s strategy to position itself for net revenue growth and margin expansion, and Yahoo will continue to hire to support key priorities” Yahoo spokeswoman Dana Lengkeek told Reuters in an email statement.

On Dec 2010, Yahoo said it will cut 4 percent of its workforce, as the struggling Web portal adjusts its operations to revive revenue growth.

Yahoo struggles to compete with Google and Facebook. On the contrary, Google Senior Vice President of Engineering and Research, Alan Eustace announced on the official Google blog that 2011 will be Google’s biggest hiring year ever.

I love Google because of our people. It’s inspiring to be part of the team. And that’s why I am excited about 2011—because it will be our biggest hiring year in company history. We’re looking for top talent—across the board and around the globe—and we’ll hire as many smart, creative people as we can to tackle some of the toughest challenges in computer science: like building a web-based operating system from scratch, instantly searching an index of more than 100 million gigabytes and even developing cars that drive themselves.

Yahoo Image Search Filter

This week, Yahoo has announced a very helpful image search filter called Creative Commons license filter.
Users are able to filter their image search results from Flickr according to availability for reuse commercially or that can be modified (remixed, tweaked, or built upon) with restrictions set by the image’s creator.
Yahoo is the first image search engine to offer this capability. Let’s wait and see what Google will do about it

How to Make a Favicon

Favicons are small images shown next to your website’s URL in the address bar of your browser. They not only make URLs  look nice but also increase brand awareness for users. When a user add a website to his favorites, websites with favicons will stand out amongst others which would improve your number of visitors.

How can you make a favicon in Photoshop?

You will make an .ico image with 16 pixels by 16 pixels. First of all, you need to download the ICO plugin for Adobe Photoshop. You can download it from Telegraphics website. When the installation finishes, execute the zip file in to the photoshop/plugins.fileformat folder in your computer.

Open photoshop and select File>New and make a new file with 64 x 64 dimentions. Remember it is best to work with multiples of 16. We will resize our image once it is finished. Create your favicon image as you like. Go to Image>Image Size and change image dimentions to 16 x 16. After  resizing the image, go to File> Save As and save the file as favicon.ico

Yahoo Tests Favicons in Search Adds

Yahoo is testing favicon displays next to search ads for some popular brands which will help users to spot the companies easily and increase branding in search.

According to Yahoo, this new feature will improve user’s search experience, increase click through rates and quality scores of the advertisers.

Advertisers can’t sign up for favicon display feature yet but can request no favicon displays for their accounts if they don’t want to have it.

Here is an example of how favicon displays in search results for “Expedia.com”

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on Yahoo
• Japanese Search Engines – Yahoo! Japan « AltSearchEngines

Effects of Economy Breakdown in Search Engines

Recession showed impacts on search engine companies as well. Here is how Google and Yahoo performed in this tough times.

Google revenue declined from one quarter to the next

Internet giant Google reported a 9.2 percent rise in quarterly net profit of 1.42 billion dollars. The figure is up six percent from the same quarter a year ago which was 1.31 billion dollars in the same quarter but down three percent compared with the fourth quarter of last year. Google said the revenue declined for the first time ever in consecutive quarters.

“Google had a good quarter given the depth of the recession — while revenues were down quarter over quarter, they grew six percent year over year thanks to continued strong query growth,” chief executive Eric Schmidt said.
According to new chief financial officer Patrick Pichette, Google was laying off 200 sales and marketing employees.

Yahoo has dramatical net income plunge

At the same time, Yahoo reported a 78% decline in net income for the first quarter 2009 and plans to cut its workforce by 5%.

Drive Traffic to Websites by Current Search Trends

If you have a website or blog, I know that you want to drive big traffic and bring leads, generate some ad revenue or just increase your Page Rank and websites’ value.

One way to drive traffic to your website is following trends and generating posts related with search phrases. There are several ways you can monitor real-time (delays are always possible) search trends such as Google Trends, Twitter and Yahoo Buzz.

Google Trends

Google trends give you approximate popular search patterns. You can see a list of most searched 100 queries. It gives search volume index for each pattern, news articles, blog posts, related searches, peak times and locations. I believe it gives great insight for popular search trends as majority of people use Google for search.

Trend topics by Twitter

Twitter is a “a real-time short messaging service” and has recently added search and trend topics features to users homepages. It gives top-ten popular tweet topics and a great global insight as they say:

“As public tweets fly in from around the globe, we analyze them to detect when certain words or phrases occur with higher frequency. These trending phrases are surfaced in the Twitter home page just under the new search box and they’re updated throughout the day.”