Good news for Yahoo on fifth birthday

Yahoo will release a new deal for advertisers

As Yahoo celebrates the fifth birthday of its search engine running independently, the internet firm will today launch a new programme for advertisers designed to further increase its revenue and competitive strength.

The Rich Ads In Search offering will let advertisers put images, video and location information into adverts hosted in Yahoo search results. Yahoo has been piloting the programme with companies such as Pedigree, Staples and Esurance but will now make it available to more businesses.

"A small group of advertisers tested it in the fourth quarter of 2008 and saw click-through rates rise by as much as 25 percent," said Yahoo's Jeff Sweat in the firm's search marketing blog.

Meanwhile, new market research from ComScore has revealed that of the 13.5 billion US searches conducted in January 2009, 21 per cent of these used Yahoo sites, while 63 per cent used Google and 8.5 per cent used Microsoft. This is a slight change from the previous month where 63.5 per cent of US searches used Google sites, 20.5 per cent used Yahoo and 8.3 per cent used Microsoft.

Yahoo was not immediately available to comment on its increase in market share, which accounts for an additional 67.5 million searches. But the gain marks a good turn for the firm, which has struggled in recent months with its long-term chief executive Jerry Yang stepping down, the Microsoft acquisition off the cards and the search deal that would have allowed Yahoo to display search ads sold by Google for a share of revenue falling through.

Yahoo senior executives Tuoc Luong and Larry Cornett noted in a blog post that the firm would continue to drive innovation in search by improved detection and response to query intent, making search results more adaptive, and delivering a better deal for advertisers.

Yahoo Search originally started as a web directory of other web sites and had little web crawling functionality of its own. Its search offering was powered by Inktomi, which it later acquired, and then by Google, until it became independent in 2004.