AT&T Picks Yahoo Over Google To Provide Search On First Android Phone

Yahoo has scored a spot as the default search engine on the new Motorola Backflip, AT&T’s first phone using the Android operating system. The web site Android and Me quotes this hands-on report from Engadget:

Yahoo has replaced Google as the default search provider throughout the phone. It’s crazy: the home screen widget, the browser, everything’s been programmed to use Yahoo.

Indeed, a Yahoo spokesperson confirms for Search Engine Land that AT&T is using its search services on the Backflip:

We are happy that AT&T has chosen Yahoo! Search as the default mobile search service on the Motorola Backflip, AT&T’s first Android device. We have a long-standing relationship with AT&T and more than 80 carrier partnerships around the world for our award-winning mobile search experience. Mobile is a key corporate priority for Yahoo! and we are focused on making our personally relevant mobile Internet services, like search, available to the broadest audience possible on the widest range of devices.

There are a handful more Android-powered phones coming soon from AT&T, but it’s unknown if they’ll also use Yahoo as the default search provider.

Yahoo TimeSense: New Trends Tool Previewed At SMX West

Today’s “Real Time Search & The Major Search Engines” session at SMX West took an interesting twist when Yahoo’s Ivan Davtchev took the stage to discuss his company’s efforts in the real-time search space.

There was some quiet chuckling when Davtchev showed screenshots of a competitor’s tool, Google Trends, as a way of determining what queries deserve to get real-time results. But he did so only to contrast a new Yahoo tool called Yahoo TimeSense that, to my knowledge, has never been seen before.


Davtchev described Yahoo TimeSense as the company’s version of Google Trends, but (as you’d expect) says it’s better because

• TimeSense uses language modeling to determine what queries are relevant to “right now”
• TimeSense is better at identifying long-tail queries, whereas Google Trends is good at identifying “head” queries

Davtchev said Yahoo TimeSense is “not public yet,” and sounded as if he was hinting that the tool will be readily available at some point in the future. A Yahoo spokesperson tells us, “The screenshot Ivan shared is from an internal tool that we currently use within Yahoo! We will let you know if/when we make it publicly available. It’s certainly something we’re looking into.”

On a related note, Davtchev also indicated that Yahoo will soon introduce real-time search results beyond their current placement in Yahoo’s news shortcut.

Google To Increase Abuse Alerts To Webmasters

Saying that web site hacking and other forms of abuse is on the rise, Google has announced plans to step up the notifications it sends to webmasters when the company finds these problems.

Beginning this month, Google will use the Message Center area in Google Webmaster Tools to notify site owners about

• Spammy or abused user-generated content
• Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
• Suspected hacking

When possible, the alerts will include specific pages that Google believes have been compromised by a third party.

In order to receive the alerts, webmasters obviously need to be signed up and have verified their site(s) in Webmaster Tools. Site owners who haven’t done that yet will be able to retrieve messages from Google going back a year.

Happy Birthday, Yahoo: 15 Years Old Today

Although its web site launched in 1994, Yahoo is celebrating its 15th birthday today — that’s in honor of the company being incorporated on March 1, 1995.

The story of Yahoo’s founding is well known: Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a directory of web sites originally called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” and renamed “Yahoo” in 1994. Yang and Filo, in fact, reminisce about the company they created in a blog post tonight on the Yahoo corporate blog:

“After many late nights and a lot of pizza, we decided to take the big leap, turn our hobby into a business, raise money and devote ourselves totally to building a company. This was no sure thing. For example, 15 years ago, we wanted a free service that was ad-supported. But the conventional wisdom was that our business needed to be subscription-based. Few people thought that advertising could be the key revenue generator for the Internet. Of course, the conventional wisdom was wrong and so today we know that August, 1995, the month our first ad went live, was a critical milestone in the history of Yahoo!, as well as the history of the internet.”

Google Chrome Rolls Out Translate Feature

Google has just released a new beta feature for Chrome browser – a translation prompt that automatically appears whenever you are visiting a site which is in a language different from your preferred  language setting. This is an instant feature that don’t require you to download any plug-ins or extensions.

Previously,  you need to go to translate.google.com and then paste the url of the site that you want to translate into your own language. This becomes tedious especially if you are citing that page. Either you link to translated page with a different URL or to the original page with the foreign language.  So that when you are browsing a translated page and you click a link, your browser would usually return an error. But now, when Google translate the page, the URL remains the same. So clicking on a link will bring you to the correct page.

In addition to this feature, Google is also introducing a new feature on privacy settings in addition to the existing incognito mode.  This is one feature of Chrome browser which lets you browse the web without leaving a trace on your computer. The new privacy feature will let you manage your privacy settings in the new “Privacy” section of Chrome’s Options dialog. You can now control how cookies, images, JavaScripts, plug-ins, and pop-ups are handled on a site-by-site basis.