Dear Woman,

Like you, I have an unusual name. In fact, I've only been able to find one other person with my name and she works in the public schools in Philadelphia (last time I checked).

I really wish I had a chance to speak with you before you filed suit. It's not Yahoo's fault that your name turned up results for porn and malware. Yahoo only crawl's the sites that are out there, and that would have been easier to change than filling out legal paperwork.

When I got married and acquired the last name Johnson, I decided to have a little fun and get the first page of Google results to rank for me instead of the woman in Philadelphia. It didn't take long. The poor woman is now banished to the last result on page 3 of Yahoo and nowhere on the first 5 pages of Google (I got tired of looking).

"Nathania Johnson" is not exactly a competitive keyword phrase and neither is was your name, "Beverly Stayart." All you had to do was get a bunch of social media accounts and put your full name on it. That's what I did. Blogspot and Flickr are good ones. Heck, having an account on SEOmoz will rank. Commenting on popular blogs helps, too.

Buying the URL with your name in it and publishing some fresh content helps big time.

If you really want to go the extra mile, you could have gotten all your friends to link to those sites with your name being the anchor text. Don't do too many all at once or the search bots will get suspicious. Then again, they also wouldn't have cared so much about such a little searched term as your name.

Now, a search for your name is filled with a bunch of links to sites talking about your legal case. It only took a day for that to happen, but going forward, it will be very difficult to change that. Ask any company with a negative result in the search for their name and they'll tell you how difficult it is to change this. That's why we do posts on reputation management.

I'm sorry that your name returned porn and malware sites. There is a reason Yahoo is number 2 - and I mean a distant number 2 - when it comes to search engine share.

I'm afraid you're likely to use your case. But if your true goal is to have better results for your name, do read the posts you find here at Search Engine Watch on a regular basis.

Sincerely,
Nathania Johnson

Five years ago, Yahoo! stopped using Google-powered results and embarked on their own search product. It's been one heck of a journey.

Yahoo! highlighted the following milestones on their blog:

• Opened search infrastructure and index to outside developers with BOSS.
• Opened search results page to outside innovation with SearchMonkey.
• Launched Search Assist, still the most sophisticated query assistance technology on the Web.
• Launched a suite of mobile search products including Yahoo! oneSearch.
• Acquired, grew, and improved Delicious, a social bookmarking tool.
• Launched Site Explorer to help site owners to manage their presence on Yahoo! Search.
• Protected users from potential viruses, spyware, and spam with SearchScan.
• Integrated music and video players directly on the search results page.

Many of the above things were rolled out over the past, tumultuous year that began with an unsolicited (and ultimately unsuccessful) acquisition attempt by Microsoft and ended with Jerry Yang stepping down as CEO and Autodesk Chairman Carol Bartz stepping in to lead the purple people.

Will she successfully guide them to achieve the following, future-thinking goals?

• Continuing to open search results page and infrastructure to improve search and encourage innovation in the industry.
• Focusing on detecting and responding better to query intent.
• Breaking the ten-blue-links paradigm by developing a richer, more adaptive search results page.
• Making it easier to conduct and share online research with Search Pad.
• Delivering a new and better advertising experience that improves relevance for users and ROI for advertisers.
  

I, for one, would love to see Yahoo! Search rise and take more search market share. I love Autodesk as a company (my husband is an AutoCAD programmer for a commerical kitchen hood company) and if anyone can bring a innovativeboost to Yahoo!, it's Carol Bartz. Innovation, which is about the only way anyone will steal market share from Google, is always great for consumers.

Viva la Yahoo! and may the next 5 years be good to the Sunnyvale search engine.

Myspace, Intel and Yahoo have launched a social networking application that allows people to surf Myspace on their TV while watching it. This means people can read and reply to messages, comments and everything else without being at their computer.

The new Myspace widget was announced ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show, that took place in Las Vegas on January 8-11th. It will be available on any Internet-connected consumer electronics, such as set-top boxes, Blu-ray players and TVs, the companies said. Although no exact launch date was provided it is assumed that it will be released in the near future.

Basically Myspace, Intel and Yahoo have developed a widget that will be able to sit at the bottom of your TV screen and used whenever you wish. It was developed by Myspace using a set of development tools that Intel and Yahoo have created called the Widget Channel. For anyone interested the widget channel was created so that applications can be made for TV’s that use information from the Internet to complement what is on the TV (e.g. a widget could allow someone to purchase a product that was on an advert from an online store without them having to go to a computer).

From what I know this Myspace widget will allow people to view profiles and receive updates (messages, comments, etc) and reply to these updates accordingly directly on their TV screen, without the need of an Internet browser or having to refresh a page for updates to appear. To reply to updates you would use your remote to type whatever you wanted with an on screen keyboard.

Now in my opinion I really hate this widget. It will either be a great development for them or just a flop, and I would guess that it will be the latter.

Okay so I’m not one for sitting watching TV and being on the Internet at the same time, I like to concentrate on whatever I am doing, I mean while I am watching a TV show I don’t like being online as well (e.g. on a laptop) because I miss parts of the show and it just ruins it. It’s kind of like having someone come into the room and start talking to you when your obviously trying to watch something. I know a lot of people won’t share this opinion and do like to surf the Internet while watching TV, but most of these people have laptops or a computer near their TV so they are able to do this, and most wouldn’t like to be limited to only surfing one site (Myspace) while doing it.

I think that this is just an attempt to try and make TV more interactive, but like the attempts before I think this will end up nowhere. Its either that or an attempt to try and combine the audiences of Fox and Myspace (both owned by Rupert Murdoch). Either way I really think it is pointless and they won’t get many people using it, but I have been wrong in the past.

What do you think about it all?

Just a few months back we told you about the launch of an updated version of the Yahoo! Calendar. The all-new Yahoo! Calendar Beta offers a host of great features like open standards (iCalendar), personalization with Flickr and drag-and-drop functionality to name just a few.

Since launching the public beta back in October, the Calendar team has been working hard behind the scenes to add more of the fantastically fabulous features (how’s that for alliteration) that you’ve been asking for. So it is with great pleasure that I can tell you they’ve just released some really exciting new stuff for you to enjoy:

• New Search: You can now search both Calendar and Notepad based on words in your event titles or notes.
• To-Do Lists: Now you can have multiple to-do lists (i.e. Personal, Work, etc.), and you can share to-do lists just like you can share your calendar. And if you don’t like to-do lists, you can hide them (just click and drag the to-do list to close it).
• Print: There’s a new print button that allows you to print your Month, Week or Day view.
• Right-click: A new right-click shortcut menu lets you add and view events, plus more. Give it a try!

Sounds pretty good, right? I especially like the new right-click menu to easily add an event to my calendar. If you haven’t tried the All-new Calendar Beta yet, maybe now is the time. You can move yourself over to the new calendar by following this link: http://switch.calendar.yahoo.com