From the NYTimes on Wednesday, here’s an interesting article on Yahoo’s latest gambit to compete with Googzilla: Yahoo Upgrades Online Search Engine

Yahoo has been working hard to whip up some buzz about the recent “enhancements” to its core search engine, and the article above provides a good, unhyped overview of the non-technical details about the “new Yahoo” as well as a brief sketch of the historic background to this latest chapter of the Search Wars (hint: they ended 3 years ago).

It seems to me that one key audience that is routinely left out of this discussion of Yahoo’s fading popularity and subsequent efforts to resurrect itself is the SEM industry. As far as I’m concerned, they badly botched their attempt to launch a new Google-free Yahoo search in 2004 not merely by putting a sub-standard product in the marketplace, but more specifically by trying to merge the Inktomi model of pay-for-indexing (Inktomi was one of their big acquisitions) with the Yahoo directory (the core of old Yahoo) in with their new and rather weak organic search engine, while simultaneously going full guns with their PPC products, which also lagged behind Google’s at the time. But it was that pay-for-organic-indexing nonsense that really annoyed a lot of search marketers and I don’t think they’ve ever completely restored their reputation within this community. Well, that and the fact that their market share has consistently dwindled in the interim may have had just a little something to with their decline in SEM land.

As for the “New Yahoo - 150% More Yahooriffic”, I haven’t really explored all these whiz-bang enhancements that are supposedly going to get Yahoo Search back in the Game, but I do like the automatic search term suggestion drop down and I like the idea that Yahoo can somehow leverage Flickr to make their image search better than those other guys’s image search . If anyone has delved further into the details of new UI improvements or other changes at Yahoo (including Yahoo local, which has been getting tweaked significantly over the past 6 months) , please share. Color me skeptical but open-minded.