Yahoo! first launched in 1994 and was the first popular web browser of the early internet age. Despite its decline over the last 15 years, it remains active and its current headquarters are in Sunnyvale, California.
Although for many years the company supported its own search engine, since 2009 it has been using Microsoft Bing‘s (besides 2015-2019, when it was powered by Google).
At its peak, Yahoo offered several services other than just a search engine, many of which are still active today. This includes Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, and Yahoo Finance. The parent company, Yahoo! Inc., still owns the search engine as well as affiliated services.
What is Yahoo Search?
Yahoo is a typical text-based search engine, appearing much the same as the likes of Google and Bing. Upon searching for a query, the web browser will display the best answer it can find at the top of the search results page. Yahoo then displays relevant links down the left-hand side of the page and may also contain a small profile of what you’re searching for on the right.
Today, you can use this browser to search for images, videos, and shopping. While it might look the same as other search engines, the results you’re likely to see can change significantly, as each engine relies on different algorithms to provide the most relevant information to read, products to buy and videos to watch.
History
The company first appeared on the world wide web in January of 1994 having started as a hobby of electrical engineering graduate students, David Filo and Jerry Yang. It was originally named ‘Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web’.
The name was later shortened to simply ‘Yahoo!’ in the same year, which is an anagram for ‘Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle’.
The Yahoo Websites Directory
Originally, the site was simply a directory of other websites, displayed in a hierarchical form. The Directory was one of the biggest of its kind available on the internet in the late-1990s, with almost as many URLs as the then-market leader, DMOZ.
Although the company released a separate crawler-based search in 2002, the Directory continued for many years. However, its relevancy became increasingly obsolete. From 2010-onwards, the company started to close country-specific Directories, and eventually closed the whole thing in 2014.
The Yahoo Search Engine
In 1995 the company unveiled Yahoo Search, which was a modern search engine function that allowed users to easily surf the web. This primarily worked alongside the Yahoo Directory until 2002 when Yahoo Search became crawler-based. The company steadily grew its search technologies throughout the early 2000s, mirroring advancements made by the likes of Google.
Yahoo Mail: User Accounts
The search engine was a popular choice for many years. However, Yahoo Mail remains on of the most popular tools that the company remains known for. Yahoo Mail was many users’ first email account, allowing them to become accustomed to, and accept, email as a modern form of communication.
The fall of Yahoo
The company suffered huge economic losses at the start of the 2000s due to the dot-com bubble bursting, which witnessed many online-based companies going bust. This was followed by a series of bad business decisions, such as neglecting to purchase Facebook.
Neglecting to understand the sign of changing times was a serious problem for Yahoo, as they consistently made mistakes and missed opportunities to keep up with Google.
Another major problem was the company’s lack of expert search engine developers. Yahoo’s programmers were notably of a lower quality than that of Google, which caused the search engine to fall behind.
It also opened them to up to consistent issues from hackers. The company gave notice in September 2013, more than 500 million users and customers were victims of a hack, causing them to lose value personal information. Other infamous hacks, such as the events of November that year, destroyed confidence in the company’s security, and spelled the end of Yahoo’s term as a competitor to Bing and Google.
The Bing takeover
After initially rejecting their offers, Yahoo eventually agreed to abandon their own search engine technology in favour of using Bing from Microsoft. Although the company has continued under the same branding, it has not used its own search engine technology since 2009, referencing a difficult legal environment.
The Importance of Yahoo
Despite Yahoo!’s fall from grace, it is still one of the main players in the search engine game, both internationally and in the U.K. specifically. Although its market shares are minuscule to that of Google, it is still used by many people on a daily basis. Therefore, failing to rank on Yahoo limits your online reach.
The search engine is also important due to the following factors:
It helps you rank on other search engines
A successful Yahoo-target SEO campaign won’t only help you rank on Yahoo, but also on Bing, DuckDuckGo, and AOL. All of these search engines are powered by Bing technology, meaning that SEO best practices apply to all of them. If you line up your content to match the standards of Yahoo, you’re also meeting the standards of Bing, and so on.
It was once the default search engine for Mozilla Firefox
Between 2014 and 2017, Yahoo was chosen as the default search engine for the web browser Mozilla Firefox. Although this is no longer the case (Firefox has since switched back to Google), Yahoo’s market share steadily increased over this time and more browsers were exposed to it.
It’s easier to achieve high-ranking spots
Google is the busiest search engine in the world, making it extremely difficult to divert traffic to your site and take the high-ranking spots. Yahoo is less busy, which means less competition. This makes it easier to snag the top-ranking spots on result pages. You may see results from your SEO campaign a lot sooner, too.
The Market Share of Yahoo!
According to data collected by Statcounter, the current worldwide market share of Yahoo is 1.33% (as of July 2022). This puts it in 4th place and only slightly behind the 3rd place Yandex, which has 1.49% of the market share. It is still ahead of the likes of Baidu and DuckDuckGo, which both feature less than 1% of the market.
Yahoo’s market share in the U.K.
Yahoo’s market share in Britain is slightly different. Although it only features 1.64% of the market share (as of July 2022 and according to Statcounter) it finds itself in 3rd place, directly behind Bing and in front of DuckDuckGo.
The Yahoo Company
Over the course of the site’s 3-decade-long career, Yahoo has introduced and discontinued many services and additional features. Although the list of defunct features may be much longer, there are still plenty of Yahoo Websites still active, including the following:
Finance
Finance is a website as well as an app that provides financial news and allows user accounts to track the stock market. Users can select markets they care about to receive personalized notifications.
Mail is a cloud-based e-mail service, which is available on desktops and as an app. You can install Mail and receive updates on any device.
Life
The Life service provides lifestyle and wellness tips as well as targeted ads for those looking for wellbeing and fitness inspiration. It’s available online or as a downloadable app.
Sport
This app allows users to access and keep up to date with the latest sports scores and fixtures. It specialises in football but also covers basketball, baseball, as well as other sports.
Entertainment
Yahoo Entertainment covers music, movies, celebrities, and other entertainment news. It’s accessible through the main Yahoo App.
News: Breaking News and Local
The News app can be set to your preferred location to provide you with news updates on what’s going on in the area. Alternatively, it can provide you with more broad international updates. Notifications can be turned on.
Weather
Available online and as an app, the Weather app details changes in temperature, forecasts, wind pressure, and sunset and sunrise times.
Native
Native is a pay-per-click advertising service, offering both advertising and search functionalities within the same marketplace.
How Does Yahoo Work?
As aforementioned, this web browser is powered by Microsoft Bing, meaning it works in much the same way as Bing does. It will rank your website based on the same ranking factors.
Luckily, Microsoft has made it easy for web developers to understand exactly what they’re looking for when ranking a website, by making the Bing Webmaster Guidelines public. Although this guide highlights the main ranking factors, it’s important not to focus on one specific factor.
Yahoo’s algorithm is constantly developing and adapting to how people use the Bing engine. Therefore, the importance of certain ranking factors can increase and diminish as time goes on. Therefore, it’s important to approach Yahoo – and Bing! – more cohesively. You can do this by incorporating all ranking factors in your SEO campaign.
These ranking factors include:
Social media
Social media plays a vital role in the success of your Yahoo campaign. While Google cares little for how many retweets, shares, or followers you receive on social media, it defines how you rank on Yahoo and Bing. For this reason, we’d recommend boosting your social media presence.
Relevancy and overall quality
The Bing-powered crawlers will first assess the relevancy of an article by counting how many times a keyword is used, both in the main body of the text, as well as in the anchor text and titles. It will then compare its findings with common search terms in order to determine your site’s overall relevancy to the topic.
The information presented in the copy will also be judged on its usefulness, substance, and overall quality.
Backlinking
Yahoo cares about the quality of the backlinks collected rather than the quantity. A few backlinks from reputable sites are of far greater value on this web browser than lots of backlinks from less trustworthy sites.
Engagement
How browsers interact with your web pages impacts ranking massively. User engagement includes things like click-through rate and dwell time. The more clicks your webpage gets, and the longer users spend looking at your content, the more likely your page will rank highly on Yahoo.
This is what differentiates Google from Bing-powered search engines, as Google claims not to consider engagement factors at all.
Click distance
Click distance refers to how many clicks it takes a user to reach a page. If a particular page on your website takes four or more clicks to reach, then it will unlikely rank. Click distance can be determined by the number of slashes found in your URL. Each slash represents a click.
Other factors
Other factors that may determine how your websites rank include:
- Image formatting (you need to include alt text, showing to search engines what you intended to show to visually impaired users)
- The amount of time it takes to load a page
- Freshness (how new is the content?)
- The location (which country is the content most relevant to and what language is used?)
