The Yahoo! Search Blog recently announced an index and algorithm update, also called “weather report.”

Dan Rampton from Yahoo! said, “We’re rolling out some updates to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms over the next few days. During this process, you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.”

Yahoo! recently announced that Yahoo! Web Analytics is now available for free to Yahoo advertisers supported by a Yahoo! account team.

Here's a screenshot of Yahoo! Web Analytic:

According to Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog:

“Yahoo! Web Analytics offers user insight that you’re not likely to find in other free analytics tools, including demographic and behavioral insight on your website visitors, near-real-time reporting, and visibility into as many as 50 different types of actions that take place on your site.”

According to one of the NY Times reports, Yahoo! is planning to layoff some more of its employees for the third time sinche the first quarter of 2008.

In earlier posts we talked about 1000 Yahoo employees being laid off for the first time. However, about 1400 employees were removed again during the last quarter of 2008. It is believed that this will be the first major layoff since Yahoo!'s new CEO Carol Bartz took charge of the company.

Yahoo! continues to update its search index. Over the next few days it is expected to complete its updation on crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. However, during these modifications it is possible that users may find certain changes in their ranking and index page shuffling.

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Yesterday, Yahoo announced that they have revamped their image search preview. The all new image preview is believed to make image searches easier.

Generally, most search engines display an image in a framed page set, when you click from the search results on a specific image. The enhanced image search by Yahoo is considered to be a step forward.

Some of the latest additions of the new image preview page are:

It has been more than a month since Yahoo Search made an update. There has been a lot of discussion going on in various forums about the changes at Yahoo. Although, there are some heavy fluctuations going on in the Yahoo Search results but there are also a few reports on how Yahoo is handling these redirects.

Some of the new Yahoo updates are about:

• Link counts dropped.

Yahoo recently released Inquisitor for iPhone users. The application is considered to make searching on mobiles faster since it will give suggestions and auto-complete your search, the moment you type. At present the new application is available at Apple outlets in the following countries:

• Canada
• UK
• France
• Germany
• Italy
• Netherlands
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• Australia
• New Zealand

Yesterday, Yahoo! Inc. named Elisa Steele as the new CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of the company. She will be responsible for Yahoo!'s brand, its global marketing strategy and its marketing functions including brand marketing, audience marketing, corporate communications, insights, policy and privacy, community affairs, and related central teams.

Yesterday, Yahoo! released an optimized version of IE8. The new version includes three new categories of instant visual results – Weather, Movie Reviews and Showtimes, and Stock Quotes. The moment you type a query in any of these categories, you'll find all the related information in the instant visual results.

To understand the topic better try the following example: Just type “weather Santa Clara, CA.” The instant visual results will display a three day weather forecast for Santa Clara.

Yahoo's search marketing team recently came out with new ad targeting features to give its advertising partners more return for their investment. Here what the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog has to say about these new features.

“Starting now, you’ll be able to target the audiences you want, when and where you want them, with a lot more control. We are rolling out demographic targeting, ad scheduling (which you might know as dayparting), and enhanced ZIP-level geo-targeting at the ad group and campaign level.”