As you may or may not know, yahoo has been struggling under the shadow of the powerhouse Google. The search portal known as Yahoo has had problems with its search queries ever since it dropped its Google search technology 3 years ago. Those 3 years yahoo has been busy building its’ own search model, and while the end user has been waiting on it the search results have been short of par.

Although over the last couple days and weeks we have seen the results stabilizing yet again from one of their updates things are far from over. Yahoo is trying to step out of Google’s shadow and taking the reigns of their company to a new level.

They are integrating many new features to the yahoo search. With these updates you will see wild and unpredictable search results in the near future that can make your search engine marketing complicated. The biggest integration comes with the name “Yahoo Search Assist”. Like the name says, it will try to help the user find what they are looking for. www.searchenginejournal.com is another site that has looked into this search assist program and this is what they said:

“Yahoo has been studying search behavior and feels that users do not think that they are good web searcher. With Yahoo Search Assist, the search technology actually identifies when users need search suggestions by measuring user typing speed and identifying hesitations in searching.”

Yahoo! had this to say about their new search assist:

“As you type, Search Assist automatically offers search terms and phrases in real time. After you’ve searched, it suggests additional search terms to try as well as new topics to consider.

It saves time. By offering great suggestions, often exactly what you had in mind, it reduces the need to complete your search or enter repetitive searches.

It’s smart. By making suggestions as you type, it eliminates one of the hardest parts of searching — coming up with the right query.

It gives you ideas. By suggesting additional search terms and topics related to what you type, it triggers ideas you hadn’t thought of to help you zero in on what you’re looking for or further explore a topic. “

Yahoo has also added a voice recognition for mobile phone searches using the new search assist. Rumors are floating around that Yahoo need this effort onto mobile platforms because Google may be acquiring Sprint Nextel so that they can push their youtube.com videos and more.

So while Yahoo is not out of the picture yet and their results are still not perfect, our client’s rankings are looking better for now. Let us all just be patient and see if Yahoo Search can come up with something new to step out from under that Google shadow.

Jim Trivolette “The SEO Doctor”