Sunnyvale, California -- Yahoo's search marketing division is invigorating their service, on Monday announced the addition of three new enhanced targeting options to its search marketing advertising solution, in an attempt to give its partner advertisers more returns for their investment. The enhanced features which will be enforced on Yahoo Sponsored Search include demographic targeting, ad scheduling and enhanced ZIP-level geo-targeting.

Here is what the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog has to say about these new features: “We try not to oversell the changes we make to Sponsored Search -- sometimes a button is just a button, after all,” says Yahoo Search Marketing Blog editor Jeff Sweat. “So, we hope you will pay attention when we tell you this: the new targeting features we are adding right now are kind of a big deal.”

These new features will be applicable at the Yahoo Search ad group and ad campaign level. Furthermore, Yahoo has fine-tuned the content match segment to make the ads more relevant to the publisher’s content.

New York -- Taking a different approach to Google's Latitude software, Yahoo's Fire Eagle team on Friday released a new app called, Friends on Fire, which integrates the location-based service to Facebook's social network, enabling people to share their location with each other. 

Google Latitude is an island unto itself, employing Google's own technology for cell phone-based location detection and for managing who gets access to your location.

On the other hand Friends on Fire, though combines together a variety of services: Yahoo's Fire Eagle, a service that can store and share your location with authorized applications, and Facebook, which handles the issue of identifying who your friends are and granting them permission to see your location.

Nevertheless, location broadcasting services still make many people uneasy, but as we have stated in the past, Fire Eagle's privacy controls are among the best available and the Facebook app is no different. Friends on Fire mirrors Fire Eagle's privacy options and will only display your location with the level of fidelity that you allow it to use. The options range from precise geo coordinates to simply the country you are currently in.

Las Vegas -- Given the hard times faced by the newspaper industry at this moment, it is not surprising that Yahoo Newspaper Consortium is adding to it existing 700 newspapers clone nationwide the Boston Globe and the St. Petersburg Times, as it convened a CEO summit meeting with newspaper executives in Las Vegas Monday.

The announcement was blared out Monday at the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium CEO Summit, which is being held at the Newspapers Association of America's MediaXchange Conference in Las Vegas.

Lately, there has been an mixed reaction over the past few weeks, as a number of members who expressed off the record a combination of hope and anxiety about the program, which has been the only ad vehicle providing strong online ad growth in the recent past.

San Francisco -- Yahoo! Inc., owner of the second most-used search engine in the U.S., and its newly-accredited CEO Carol Bartz has been carrying out many changes recently, is in discussion with Vodafone Group Plc about the distribution of its mobile search product in Europe, people familiar with the discussion said.

The pact may make Yahoo's mobile search product the default software on phones sold by Newbury, England-based Vodafone in Europe, said one person, who requested anonymity because no contract has yet been signed. Vodafone has a distribution deal with Google Inc. that expires this year, and Yahoo isn’t the only party the carrier is talking to, the people said.

“Bartz has 2009 to establish that change is not merely being talked about, but is really happening.”

San Francisco -- Data portability is the name of the game that everybody wishes to become part of it these days. From OpenID to Facebook Connect to Google Friend Connect, there are more and more ways to use a single login and make your information available anywhere on the web. And today, the latest to join the race is: Yahoo Updates, which became the latest to compete with more than 600,000 websites today with the launch of a new partnership with commenting infrastructure company JS-Kit.

Yahoo Updates is lifting the curtain in a big way by partnering with JS-Kit, a service identified as a “distributed social network connecting more than 600,000 sites,” which powers comments and ratings on sites like AOL and Sun Microsystems. Sites on these network employing the JS-Kit comment widget are already hooked in to Yahoo Updates, enabling users to publish stories and comments from around the web onto their Yahoo Updates feed.

San Francisco -- Last year, Yahoo trumpeted that it had stacked up its possession with a YouTube-like video hosting to its Flickr photo-hosting site -- but only for paid users of the Pro version. The struggling Internet pioneer on Monday declared that all Flickr members with free accounts can now upload snippets of video to the website in a budding challenge to Google-owned YouTube, although they are limited to two videos a month, also it has enabled high-definition video uploading and viewing, and use a time-line feature to see when events happen around the world.

Previously, Flickr has offered video to Pro accounts for over a year now. But from now free users will be allowed to upload two videos per month, and each video is fixed to 90 seconds in length and 150 MB in file size limit still applies to everyone.

Sunnyvale, California -- Carol Bartz, Yahoo's iron lady is gaining momentum with her newly selected battalion the process of sculpturing Yahoo into her mould of what she wants for the company and in the midst of shake-up the staff of the company seem to be enjoying the change. Apart from revamping the management, Yahoo has also initiated some change as well in its 2006 partnership with a select group of newspapers.

Terry Widener, a 53-year-old newspaper seller at The Knoxville News Sentinel in Knoxville, Tenn., had never had a chanced to sell an Internet ad.

But, with the Yahoo-Newspaper ad venture that was originally launched to deal with classified ads but most recently that has been focused around a new ad system that enables them to sell graphical ads on their sites that are aimed as specific audiences -- such as car buyers or sports enthusiasts.

Sunnyvale, California -- Google may be out-riding Yahoo Search in terms of market share, but with applications like Search Monkey and BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), Yahoo is still attempting to innovate in the search space. On Thursday Yahoo announced a deeper integration with Facebook functionality directly into its search results as part of its SearchMonkey open semantic program.

Now, when you perform search for a person on Yahoo, and if they have a public Facebook profile, a link to that profile will show up in search results, along with a pictures and several actions you can take such as: add them as a friend, “poking” them, sending them a message, and viewing their friends.

However, this precisely works well on Facebook profiles that have been made available for indexing by search engines, something Facebook launched in late 2007.

San Francisco -- Yahoo Inc.'s new Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz on Thursday announced in a detail-free blog post took the wraps off a broad reshuffled management plan designed to break-apart what she called the “silos” that had slowed down the Internet company, while naming a Chief Marketing Officer and announcing the departure of Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen, who just a day earlier made a presentation at a tech conference, in a bid to regain ground lost to Google Inc.

While Yahoo's CFO and mobile czar pack their bags, Bartz is making her presence felt, with a new focus on improving relations with customers, she explained:

“Today I'm rolling out a new management structure that I believe will make Yahoo a lot faster on its feet,” Bartz said in a blog post Thursday. “For us working at Yahoo, it means everything gets simpler. We will be able to make speedier decisions, the notorious silos are gone, and we have a renewed focus on the customer,” Bartz said. “For you using Yahoo every day, it will better enable us to deliver products that make you say, 'Wow.'”

San Francisco -- Internet pioneer Yahoo! Inc., which declined a Microsoft Corp. buyout offer last year, but on Wednesday an avid reports of a search deal between the duo surfaced once again, when Yahoo's Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen expressed openness, said the Sunnyvale company was not opposed to striking a deal with Microsoft if the price was right, and noting that an ability to retain data about users' online intentions would be essential to any transaction.

“The foundation of any deal we might do would be full access to the data for intent,” Yahoo Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen said during the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference held in San Francisco.

“We want to do it for the right reasons and the right economics,” Jorgensen said.

San Francisco -- In an effort to make its core cashcow more powerful, Yahoo on Tuesday embarked on to increase its appeal to advertisers by offering three new tools to target Web audiences -- Search Retargeting, Enhanced Retargeting, and Enhanced Targeting, including the ability to select advertisements based on what a person has searched for over the Internet.

With the global state of economy worsening, in such situation every dollar counts, particularly in the volatile field of online advertising. The technology, which is dubbed as Search Retargeting, is one of three new features created to tailor ads based on user behavior.

Likewise, Yahoo's Enhanced Retargeting product offers personalized display ads to users who have recently surfed specific content or e-commerce sites.

Sunnyvale, California -- Neeraj Khemlani, Yahoo!'s ex-general manager and executive in charge of news and information, on Monday announced his resignation at the Web portal to accept the position of vice president and special assistant to the CEO at the media conglomerate Hearst Corp., amid reports that new chief executive Carol Bartz was planning a major shakeup of management this week.

In his new role, Khemlani, 38, will support and coordinate digital content across Hearst, beginning March 23, he will report directly to CEO Frank Bennack, Hearst said in a statement.

“Hearst's major operating groups have all made substantial progress towards our corporate objective of fully participating in the digital transformation,” said Hearst CEO Frank Bennack in a statement.

San Francisco -- A latest study suggests that Yahoo could be outstandingly winning the battle with archrival Google in the free web analytics market, despite Google's success in the small and medium sized business market, Yahoo Web Analytics surpasses its rival in several areas, and is a better fit for enterprises than Google Analytics, according to the CMS Watch Web Analytics Report 2009.

This is, of course, an unexpected bombshell, considering that the analytics service provided by Yahoo! is younger than Google's: Yahoo! Web Analytics was came in to being in 2008, after the acquisition of IndexTools. Yahoo! Web Analytics has also better features than Google, as it is obvious if

Sunnyvale, California -- Struggling internet pioneer Yahoo Inc., wrestling to reclaim its market position from Google's claw, on Thursday announced the introduction of a new online search advertising system with rich media capabilities, adding videos and images to advertising that previously consisted solely of uninspired text in its paid-for listings.

Last December, Yahoo introduced Rich Ads In Search program among a selected group of advertisers, which according the a Yahoo! blog post, click-through rates rose “as much as” 25 percent.

The Rich Ads In Search program, geared up to go live in the U.S. on Monday, will now enable

Barcelona -- Seizing the opportunity at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday, Yahoo unveiled a revamped and reorganized its mobile service that will offer an iPhone-like experience for people who cannot or will not splash out for the iconic but pricey Apple device as times get hard. The smartphone service will be released in three versions: one for the mobile Web, one for the iPhone, and one for other smartphones, which will allow users to access e-mail, social networking sites, and news, plus Yahoo's OneSearch with Voice, which accepts spoken search requests.

The newly announced service will debut at the end of March in a form downloadable to any phone with a Web browser or will be available from May in custom versions for hundreds of smartphones from Nokia, RIM, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Motorola, for devices that run Windows Mobile -- and for Apple's iPhone itself. The beta-test version, offered this week, is available to a limited number of users.

San Francisco -- Last week, the struggling Sunnyvale, California web portal disappointed the fans of MyWeb, announcing that its four-year-old web bookmarking service, will be discontinued from March 18. The company is now encouraging its users to continue using other Yahoo! bookmarking services instead.

A visit to the sites homepage will welcome users with the following message:

We are streamlining our bookmark services. As part of this effort Yahoo! will be shutting down MyWeb on March 18, 2009 and moving users to Yahoo! Bookmarks. Your MyWeb bookmarks are already available to you on Yahoo! Bookmarks. You can begin using this new service now or continue using MyWeb until the shutdown date.

New York -- When Yahoo launched BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) last year, the company mentioned that it expect to generate money from the service. On Wednesday, Yahoo has announced several new developer innovations to its Yahoo Search BOSS API, allowing increased access to structured data and longer abstracts, and is also imposing fees for using (BOSS) in order to support its plan to offer developers service-level agreements (SLAs) and increased daily query limits.

Developers will be able to utilize the BOSS API to access SearchMonkey, which can make search results more useful and attractive using structured data, Yahoo said Wednesday.

Yahoo will impose a fee for the use of BOSS API (application programming interface), the service by which other Web sites can extract Yahoo's search data then redesign it to their hearts' content, according to a blog post by Ashim Chhabra of Yahoo's Search BOSS team. Previously, the company had hoped to generate money from BOSS by requiring outsiders with high-traffic sites to show Yahoo search ads next to their results.

San Francisco -- As part of its ongoing effort to energize and intensify its search engine to compete with Google and Microsoft, Yahoo has started testing a new project called “Search Pad” intended to help users effortlessly acquire in-depth research and help you keep track of your results to complete important tasks.

Yahoo on Wednesday said in a blog post that it was experimenting on a new tool to help people better organize the abundance of information that crops up while doing research on the Web.

Yahoo Search Pad helps users keep track of search query terms used while doing research on the site and, when it detects a trend, offers to save the result in an online document. If you take its advice, it shows you a page already populated with the Web sites you have browsed on the subject.

New York -- Yahoo has instantly closed its Ads in RSS service, with effect from February 2, 2009, the service which allowed network publishers to place contextual advertising into syndicated content and get a portion of the action thanks to a revenue-sharing program.

However, there is not much information as to why -- although this e-mail that was sent out to the network members:

Dear Yahoo! publishing partner, “We wanted to let you know that we are closing our Ads in RSS program effective February 2, 2009. We have ended this beta program to focus on other more broadly used ad products for our publishing partners, such as Sponsored Search and Content Match. We recommend that you remove current Content Match tags from your RSS pages.”

San Francisco -- Yahoo Inc., the Internet search portal ended its disastrous quarter in the red, nevertheless the setback is not as bad as expected. During its Q4 earnings call Tuesday, Yahoo baffled Wall Street’s pessimistic earnings expectations and posted a stronger-than-anticipated fourth-quarter profit, following many months of cost-cutting initiatives coupled with a weak advertising market, as its new chief executive pledged to do whatever it takes to straighten-up the Internet pioneer’s financial ship.

But if the notion given by freshly appointed CEO Carol Bartz is correct, the company is intelligent to look forward, rather than back.

The results that were delivered Tuesday closed the books on Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang’s fruitless 18-month tenure as CEO. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company minted a new leader, Carol Bartz, two weeks ago in its latest attempt to devise a turnaround.