Yahoo launched Direct Display Builder in India

Yahoo! Inc. launched Direct Display Builder in India. This new search service places information directly into the search result pages, rather than following the traditional way of displaying it only after clicking the second time; something similar to Google's Instant Search feature. Thus, if you enter the search term 'Mumbai weather', a small box will open, showing the weather in Mumbai, even without you having to press ENTER.

Amit Dayal, Vice President (Engineering, Search and Marketplaces group), Yahoo! said, "DD Builder currently supports 15 categories, including movies, celebrities, stocks, weather, news, shopping and locals in India. Our idea is to at least double it here, and to 200 in the US soon. You will see a larger set of rich categories to smaller ones". He also said that the company had tied up with Nokia last year to introduce the mobile phone maker's digital mapping arm, Navteq's maps in the US later this year. When asked about the same for India, he said, "While Nokia will be the backend for the maps, we will be building the user experience. It s a global strategy and if it (maps) were to be offered in India, the partner will be Nokia".

Also, Yahoo! plans to launch Search Direct, which is a tool combining content and structured data, resulting in a rich search experience, and Bingo Algo: Transition by the end of this year. It must be noted that the search provider had recently also launched Vertical Intent Search and Quick Apps, which may have helped increase the number of people using Yahoo! By 1.7% from April (17.5%) to May (19.6%), while competitors Google and Bing registered a negative growth of 0.84% and 0.74% respectively.

Source : Yahoo launched Direct Display Builder in India

Bing Closes Gap on Google's Search Engine Lead

Bing, Microsoft's little search engine that could, has taken 30 percent of the U.S. search market share, posing a serious threat to Google's dominance in the field.

According to Hitwise, Bing raked in 30.01 percent in March, with 14.32 percent of those searches coming from Bing.com and the remaining 15.69 percent from Yahoo Search, which Bing has been powering since August 2010. Bing got a 6 percent increase over February, and Yahoo a 5 percent boost, but Google saw its market lead decline, going from 66.69 percent to 64.42 percent.

Business Insider notes that Bing's 30 percent share is a symbolic number because that's what Yahoo had back in 2005, when Microsoft first launched Bing. August 2010 is also symbolic: at the time, Google was at 71.59 percent of the U.S. search market and has since then lost roughly 10 percent.

The likelihood of Bing blasting past Google anytime in the near future is low, but Mashable did a little math and discovered that if Google continues losing two to three percent per month, and Bing continues its trend of gaining five or six percent each month, Bing could overtake Google by 2012. Not bad for a search engine that was accused of stealing results from its competition.

Source : Bing Closes Gap on Google's Search Engine Lead