Yahoo executives previewed a grab bag of new features on Wednesday to demonstrate what they called a commitment to reinvent Internet search, even as new research showed the Sunnyvale company lost more ground to its rivals last month.
One new feature was timed to coincide with this month's Winter Olympics: Type an Olympics-related keyword on Yahoo and you'll get a box that pulls together embedded video and links to news, photos, schedules and a running tally of medals, along with the usual assortment of links to other Web sites.
Other ideas are still in the works. Yahoo executive Larry Cornett showed reporters a smart phone application that would let users search a neighborhood for restaurants or other amenities by pulling up a map and then using a finger to trace a line around the neighborhood on the phone's touch-screen.
Yahoo is also working on an e-mail feature that could automatically offer search links for keywords from current events — for example, linking to a video of Conan O'Brien in an e-mail that mentions the talk show host who recently left his job.
"You have to rethink what is search," said Cornett, vice president of consumer products for Yahoo Search. He said the company wants to help Internet users get useful information "without even knowing they're searching, without having to go to an empty
box and type in the keywords." That strategy, said Yahoo senior vice president Shashi Seth, "is what we're betting the farm on." It's a big bet. The market research firm comScore reported this week that Yahoo's share of the Internet search market fell from 17.3 percent in December to 17 percent in January, after declining or staying flat every month last year. Google continued to dominate the market, although it slipped from 65.7 percent to 65.4 percent, while Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, increased its share from 10.7 percent to 11.3 percent. "Overall, the trends continue to be very strong for Bing and remain very bad for Yahoo," investment analyst Ben Schachter of Broadpoint AmTech wrote in a note to clients, adding that he doesn't think the decline is over yet. Yahoo said last summer that it planned to overhaul its search offerings in an attempt to stem a downward slide in its business. The company had negotiated a deal that gives Microsoft a slice of advertising revenue in exchange for using Bing as the behind-the-scenes engine for generating Yahoo search results. New CEO Carol Bartz said that would let Yahoo focus on providing the best overall user interface and "search experience." Since then, Yahoo has been working on ways to provide easy access to a rich array of results — including news, video and even social networking feeds — instead of just serving up static Web links. "So you have kind of a one-stop shop right here," Cornett said Wednesday. Google and Microsoft are racing to offer similar features. But Yahoo executives insisted they have edged ahead in the depth and breadth of their offerings. The company already offers packages of information about hot news topics, similar to its new Olympics offering, and is expanding its offerings on TV shows, celebrities and other subjects. While insisting that high-quality content will draw users and create new opportunities for Yahoo to sell advertising, executives also said they are working on new services for advertisers that they hope will increase revenue. These include giving advertisers more control over ad placement, new kinds of multimedia display ads and even a tool that makes it easier for advertisers to import their Google ads to Yahoo. "We understand that we have to try harder to earn their time and energy on our platform," said David Pann, Yahoo's vice president of search advertising.
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