PurposeDrivenPromotion Search Marketing Articles

Yahoo Local Search recently re-launched with a host of new features, improved functionality and a new look.

And while these new features add to an already functional local service one must wonder if these changes are "worth it"?

After all, who uses local search anyways? Why do a local search when you can just do a regular search, hoping for local results?

The truth is, local search is beginning to play a larger part in how we search. While we may not notice it, local search is slowly becoming integrated into the regular search results.

As such we have to be aware of local search and its options. Therefore in this article we will review the new Yahoo local search.

I recently read an interesting article which compared YouTube (a popular video sharing site) traffic to Google. In it, YouTube was more popular than Google, at least according to web measurement firm Alexa.

And that struck a chord with me. I've dealt with Alexa before so I know it's shortcomings.

In this article we look at why Alexa data is flawed and how you need to be aware of that.

A recent study published by The American Customer Satisfaction Index indicates that Yahoo is actually the most satisfying search engine in the US.

The results follow a study which measures overall satisfaction in many industries based on consumer interviews.

In addition to Yahoo being considered the most satisfying, Google dropped by almost 4%. But despite this drop, Google continues to be the most used search engine.

So the question becomes: Why is Google the most used engine? If people are more satisfied with Yahoo shouldn't that translate into increased usage?

Recently, Google announced a "groundbreaking" change to the way it serves search results. Essentially from this day forward, Google was going to serve results from all their properties which may match a search query, and not just results from it's search index.

In other words, a search for a Canon digital camera may not only return results from the main search index, but also shopping results, news results, and video results (among others).

In fact, Google has been doing this for some time, however they explain that the results will become more noticeable as time goes on.

But Google isn't the only one jumping into the "Universal search" field. Ask has been doing this for some time, and recently Yahoo updated it's search results with similar universal results.

So who is most effective at this new type of search?

As you may have noticed, this website has undergone some changes. And while it looks different than before, the biggest changes actually happened in the backend, where you can't see them.

Up until now, Purposedrivenpromotion.com has been hosted on the open source CMS Mambo. We chose it because it was relatively easy to set up (and of course free to use :) ).

But Mambo is one of those systems that, unless you have a lot of resources to manage it, it can become unruly.

That is what we found when using it - because we are a smaller company, we don't have the time or resources to expend on a large CMS. We found Mambo just too big for us.

That's why, after just over a year, we changed to a much smaller, more familiar CMS. One that you may not immediately consider using for website content management.