Yahoo! moves further towards content
Jinfo Blog

By Penny Crossland

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Yahoo!’s search engine AlltheWeb is no more. The company had announced its demise in December as part of a general cull of several of its online products, such as bookmarking site Delicious (as highlighted by Joanna Ptolomey in her posting). While AlltheWeb’s 115,000 unique monthly visitors may be upset at the closure – see comments left on TechCrunch’s site – this figure does not compare well with Yahoo!’s 78 million unique monthly visitors, so the writing was on the wall. Yahoo! probably wants to concentrate on its own search portal, which is not doing that well itself.

Nevertheless, I remember using the search engine as an alternative to Google and frequently getting more satisfactory results.  As searchenginewatch points out, AlltheWeb did at one stage rival Google in the number of pages indexed and in fact was a pioneer in developing search technology such as showing search results as you type.

Other sites on Yahoo!’s”death list” are MyBlogLog, a social networking site for bloggers, to be replaced by Yahoo! Pulse, and AltaVista, which is to close in December. The powers that be obviously think that Delicious is worth too much to just shut down. According to Business Insider, there are apparently plans to sell this site for up to $2 million.

The disposals fit in with Yahoo!’s business plan to pull back from search, where it can no longer compete with the big guys, and concentrate its efforts on content, community and special features. In keeping with this plan, Yahoo! announced Yahoo! Search Direct in March, a feature similar to Google Instant, but with an extra touch: instead of being presented with a page consisting of links, results appear in edited format and with images under the search box.

In February, the company announced plans for a tablet product called Livestand, to be launched this summer. It will personalise news and entertainment content and is aimed particularly at small magazine publishers who may not want to go it alone in the digital sphere.

Finally, on the community front, Yahoo! is competing with AOL, albeit on a smaller scale, by producing local content in some of the US’s major cities. Local news is published on Yahoo! Local. As reported by paidContent, original news articles are supplemented with aggregated local news and events. The jury is still out on which one of these new ventures will make Yahoo! stand out from the crowd.

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