On March 26, 2004, Yahoo! announced the pending purchase of the european comparison shopping portal Kelkoo.com.
According to Terry Semel, chariman and CEO of Yahoo!,”Kelkoo will add depth and breadth to Yahoo!’s integrated network of services for consumers, and adds another set of powerful tools for marketers seeking to reach them.” He also explained the purchase in more detail: “commerce has emerged as a key component of search, and the combination of Web search, product search and comparison shopping will help further Yahoo!’s goal to create the most comprehensive and best user experience on the Web globally.” That is 7 out of 8 notches for Yahoo!’s bid to match Google’s formidable technology toolkit;
- 1 for directory search (their one founding element)
- 2 for creating their own search engine spider (Inktomi being version 1)
- 3 for Image Search
- 4 for News Search
- 5 for implementing their own Pay-Per-Click Model (started with Overture)
- 6 for comparison shopping search engine (adding Kelkoo should improve their existing technology – when the sale is final)
- 7 for Groups Search (Yahoo! Groups)
- 8… what are they missing here? Yahoo! still does not have its own clearly defined Blog system!
There were rumors back around August or September that they were hunting down potential technology investments, however, it does not appear anything came from it. The only site that Yahoo! does have in place for blogging is in Korea at kr.blog.yahoo.com which is perhaps a hint at a future implementation to Yahoo.
There were rumors back around August or September that they were hunting down potential technology investments, however, it does not appear anything came from it. The only site that Yahoo! does have in place for blogging is in Korea at Currently blogs.yahoo.com is referred to the groups.yahoo.com site… I can only hope that this is a temporary solution and one that will be remedied soon.
Are you interested in keeping up on all of the nuances of Yahoo!? There are many nuances with any company as large as Yahoo! and I found a site that does a decent job of keeping up to date on the latest news and gossip: http://yahoo.weblogsinc.com/