Yahoo And Microsoft Launches New Services To Beef Up Web Traffic

Top search engines Yahoo and Microsoft are revamping their portfolio of services and websites to expand their areas of operation in an effort to increase web traffic to counter Google’s control over Internet. In 2008 Yahoo and Microsoft launched services in new and as well as existing areas of search, news, advertising, broadcasting etc.

Yahoo to restrain MSN from being a potential threat to #2 position in the near future and in an attempt to catch up Google launched new services, which could add new users.

Searchscan is the latest feature by Yahoo partnered by McAfee to match Google in real time link scanning. Searchscan identifies three types of risks that result in Yahoo search results page- ‘Browser Exploits’- Sites that automatically trigger malicious download when visited and ‘Dangerous Downloads’- sites that offer potentially dangerous software such as viruses, spyware or adware; and ‘Unsolicited Email’ - sites that send unsolicited emails or inappropriately share email addresses with third parties.

Yahoo Shine is a new launch; a sub domain of yahoo.com is targeted to streamline its online women (aged 24-54) market. Through this ‘exclusive for women’ website yahoo is trying to leverage ad revenues generated from advertisers who target this lucrative demography.

Yahoo Buzz, a similar to Digg is launched by Yahoo is a news service, which provides popular news based on the votes given by members, the searches done on yahoo and emails received. Here Yahoo has an advantage of having a search engine that is automatically leveraged to find out the current buzz news. And also, unlike Digg, Yahoo Buzz entertains articles and videos only from a bouquet of pre-selected sources, such as Time, Forbes and wired.com, which makes it a different player.

Microsoft is also catching up the momentum by revamping two of its existing services – MSN Live News and MSN adCenter, now changed as Microsoft Live Search News and Microsoft adCenter Community. Live Search News is directly being a competitor to Google news, upgrades its features on home page and the search results page for a better experience.

Microsoft adCenter Community is also a direct competitor to Google Adwords in the PPC advertising domain. It is a community portal where the advertisers and other users cannot only contact the Microsoft employees but also each other to yield better results. The new features in the community are product/service specific blogs, categorized user forums, multimedia distribution including video interviews, audio podcasts, training videos and user profiles.

It is clear that Yahoo and Microsoft are using new & innovative strategies to gain more popularity, to generate more revenues and ultimately to match up with Google. Only time will tell if this strategy will work for them.

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