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Yahoo!’s mobile search product, oneSearch, has been selected by T-mobile for Web2go, their new customizable mobile web portal.

Yahoo’s oneSearch is designed to provide answers. For example, if you query a sports team, the results will give you scores, schedules, team profiles and the team’s web site.

David Ko, senior vice president, Connected Life, Yahoo! Inc. had this to say: “With our innovative products and global partnerships we are a leader in mobile search and are incredibly excited to bring Yahoo! oneSearch to more and more users every day. Together, T-Mobile and Yahoo! are providing users with compelling mobile services, while creating unique opportunities for advertisers to reach the rapidly growing audience of mobile consumers.”

In September, Yahoo! announced that oneSearch had been set as default on AT&T’s mobile web portal. In August, a shortcut to oneSearch was launched on select Nokia devices.

Sometimes, a company’s marketing efforts can have an unintentional impact from a link building perspective. Such is the case with this fantasy sports community site focused on building communities in Facebook and other social media environments. In today’s Web analytics and ROI column, “Social Media Link Building: From Fantasy to Reality,” Eric Enge shares the successful strategy of Citizen Sports Network.

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Yahoo! Live, a live streaming video product build on Brickhouse, will stop broadcasting December 3, 2008. In a statement on the Yahoo! Live blog, the Keith Thornhill said:

Our mission here on the Brickhouse team is to quickly develop product ideas that can add value to Yahoo! as a whole. To do this effectively we constantly evaluate our early-stage products and sometimes have to make the hard decision to move on, in order to continue exploring new territory and developing new products.

I, for one, will always hold dear a Yahoo! Live memory from this past summer. My family had (finally) just gotten a Nintendo Wii and my daughter and I live broadcasted our earliest Wii Sports matches.

On the other hand, I won’t miss the creepy people who had less than the best intentions with live streaming.

Despite Yahoo’s decline in the search market as of late, some are beginning to cry foul, saying Wall Street is punishing YHOO just a little too much. Prices dipped below $11 a share this week, almost half the value when Microsoft made its acquisition offer for $31 per share.

A couple of points in defense of Yahoo:

1. Its decline in search market share is slight. They’re still #2. They’re comparable to the Apple of the search world if you’re just looking at the numbers.
2. The stock is being brought down by the greater market. Even Google’s stock is down to the mid-300s, despite beginning the year in the high 500s. But Google posted an increase in revenue and beat the pessimistic Street yesterday. Their stock is on the rise at this hour, while the Dow Jones is on the decline again.
3. They have a bunch of strong properties, including Yahoo Sports, which had a stellar August thanks to the Olympics. They’re also number 1 in email.

A couple of points in defense of Wall Street:

1. Jerry Yang is no Steve Jobs (or at least not anymore).
2. The search advertising partnership with Google has been delayed while they attempt to work things out with a wary DOJ.
3. The economy has everyone holding their wallets tight.

Jerry Yang and the gang need to refocus on the customer instead of executive bonuses, while Wall Street needs to understand that while advertising in general may decline, search advertising is an attractive option for advertisers looking to maximize budgets.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Microsoft remains a scorned lover.

Hindsight is always 20/20, and that Microsoft acquisition offer for Yahoo earlier this year is looking sweeter by the moment looking in the rear view mirror. Too bad Yahoo rejected the $31 per share offer, because their stock has plummeted to $13 a share this week.

To be fair, some of the drop is due to the greater markets. Even Google is down to the mid-$300s after being up around $580 earlier this year. Another major factor is that Google and Yahoo have delayed the implementation of their search advertising deal.

Yesterday, Brian Sullivan at Fox Business was asking “Where’s the shareholder outrage?” While the markets are offering plenty of outlets for a variety of shareholder outrage, at least one Yahoo investor, Mithras Capital, is proposing a new Microsoft-Yahoo deal.

The deal would have Microsoft buying Yahoo for $22 a share. We know why the investor wants this: They want to recoup some of their losses.

But at this point, what’s in it for Microsoft? Yahoo continues to lose search market share and seems to be more concerned with securing the proving grounds of executives than building a business model based on users.

We know by now that banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were structuring their businesses to benefit executive bonuses. We also know that Yahoo did the same thing to throw a wrench into the Microsoft deal.

Is their really any faith left that Yahoo is on the mend? The Google advertising partnership only works if Yahoo starts regaining market share. But without innovation in search, that’s not going to happen.

I firmly believe that there are plenty of bright minds at Yahoo, but like far too many companies, management gets in the way.

A merger with AOL still might be a good idea though. Yahoo has strong portal properties, including Sports and Finance. AOL’s Platform-A consistently performs as the top ad network. AOL has also been making tiny gains in search. If you put their strengths together, you just might have something worth saving.

For the time being, though, it looks like investors should have sold their stock long ago. Microsoft has to be prepared for tough economic times, and I’m not sure throwing billions away on Yahoo’s flailing search product is a wise investment at this point.

In August, Americans went online at work to get sports info 26% more year-over-year, thanks largely in part to the Olympics and Fantasy Football. Yahoo! Sports enjoyed a whopping 112% growth, putting them in the top spot for the month, according to Nielsen Online

Also of note, visits from women jumped 37% while traffic growth from men increased by 21%.

Here’s the chart:

Related Reading:
Yahoo Wins Gold Medal for Online Olympic Traffic
NBC’s Olympic Fool’s Gold; Google Comes Home Empty-Handed
Online Olympic Traffic Soars; Mobile Viewing Habits Form
ConnectU Co-Founders Place 6th in Olympics Rowing

According to a new report from eMarketer entitled, “Video Advertising Online: Spending and Pricing,” online video advertising will peak at 78.9% in 2012 — when “both traditional and alternative media companies will be distributing far more professional-quality video content online, and when the national elections and the summer Olympics will contribute far more to video ad spending than they will in 2008.”

That doesn’t mean that growth has been anemic this year. According to eMarketer, this year’s 55.9% increase in online video ad spending is a key indication that the channel is at least gaining speed — accompanied by parallel growth in the kind of trusted video content, such as sports, to support it.

David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer and author of the new report, says, “Next year, there will be slightly slower growth, due to the still-struggling economy and the fact that advertisers are working out the best ways to do online video ads.”

He adds, “Marketers want video advertising for its far-greater branding power than other online formats.” Meanwhile, “Publishers want video advertising for its far-greater revenues — or at least higher CPMs—than other online ad formats.”

Stay tuned to see what happens next.

In accordance with the terms of the settlement with Carl Icahn, Yahoo has added two more board members to complete the expansion to 11. Frank Biondi and John Chapple, who previously were members of Icahn’s proxy board, have been appointed just two weeks after Icahn’s appointment was made official. 8 of Yahoo’s previous board stayed on for the deal.

Here’s the lowdown on the new dudes:

Frank Biondi has served as senior managing director of WaterView Advisors LLC, a private equity limited partnership focused on media and entertainment, since 1999. From April 1996 to November 1998, Mr. Biondi served as chairman and chief executive officer of Universal Studios, Inc. From July 1987 to January 1996, Mr. Biondi served as president and chief executive officer of Viacom, Inc. Mr. Biondi is a director of Amgen, Inc., Cablevision Systems Corporation, Hasbro, Inc., The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation and Seagate Technology.

John Chapple has served as president of Hawkeye Investments LLC, a privately-owned equity firm investing primarily in telecommunications and real estate ventures, since October 2006. Prior to forming Hawkeye, Mr. Chapple served as president, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Nextel Partners from January 1998 to June 2006, when the company was purchased by Sprint Communications. From 1995 to 1997, Mr. Chapple was the president and chief operating officer for Orca Bay Sports and Entertainment in Vancouver, B.C., which at the time owned and operated Vancouver’s National Basketball Association and National Hockey League sports franchises in addition to the General Motors Place sports arena. From 1988 to 1995, he served as executive vice president of operations for McCaw Cellular Communications and subsequently AT&T Wireless Services following the merger of those companies. Mr. Chapple serves on the board of directors of several telecommunications companies: Cbeyond, Inc. (Nasdaq: CBEY) an integrated service telephone company, and privately held companies Seamobile Enterprises, which provides integrated wireless services at sea, and Telesphere Networks, Inc., a VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) company providing service in 44 states. In addition, he has served as a member of Syracuse University’s board of trustees since 2005 and as chairman since 2008.

Yahoo recently launched BOSS, aka Build your Own Search Service. Third party developers wasted no time making use of the API to build their version of what search should look like. Yahoo featured four BOSS applications on their Yahoo Search blog.

The first one was 4 Hour Search. Named for how long it took developer Sam Pullara to build the BOSS API/YUI design mashup. It looks a lot like newly launched search engine Cuil.

And just like Cuil, 4 Hour Search is experiencing errors this morning. The above screenshot is Yahoo-supplied. And that’s not the only BOSS app that was struggling.

Newsline didn’t work for me at first. I conducted a search comparing the coverage of the situations in South Ossetia, Georgia and the coup in Mauritania. At first, I got error pages. Then, I was able to get results, but not that many from today or the past week. And that’s after I found the current news. The page brings up a dynamic timeline (which is cool), but it loaded news from 2 years ago front and center.

3D visualization search app Tianamo crashed my Firefox browser, then loaded just a dark blue screen in IE. But here’s the screenshot Yahoo posted:

There was one app that did just fine - PlayerSearch. This BOSS app is great for sports fans - especially Fantasy Sports fanatics. This site worked just fine. Have at it, sports junkies.

It’s likely that the developers weren’t prepared for so much traffic to come their way, but Yahoo should have known better before it told the world about the new apps.

After the latest round of attempted negotiations with Yahoo and investor Carl Icahn, Microsoft is once again saying that it is moving on from trying to acquire the second-place search engine.

Addressing the attendees at Microsoft’s financial analyst meeting, Ballmer explained Microsoft’s Plan B for building search and competing with Google. And like Joel McHale on E!’s The Soup, I’ve read the transcript so you don’t have to. Here are the sound bites.

First up, the reason why Microsoft thinks it can compete in a Google-dominated search marketplace:

Search is ripe for innovation. It has not been the most innovative category in the world. I mean, think back, what did search look like five years ago, 10 blue links on the left, some ads on the right, and maybe some ads on the top. What does it look like now, 10 blue links on the left, some ads on the right, and maybe something on the top. It is ripe for innovation. If you say to yourself, five years from now, 10 years from now will search be as humdrum, hard, 50 percent of searches don’t actually lead to an answer to somebody’s problem, is this an area that’s ripe for innovation, in user experience, natural language, semantic understanding, consumer experience? The business model hasn’t been touched.

Give Google credit, they invented the business model that supports the modern search business, and yet it hasn’t been touched. How do you involve the consumer? How do you move to a pay-for-action model? How do you reward the consumer, and involve the consumer economically? This is a category that’s ripe for innovation. And that’s important, because if it’s not ripe for innovation, we shouldn’t be doing what we’re doing. We will not be able to be very successful by only doing what the market leader does.

Next Ballmer says that Microsoft is ready to get in the ring with Google:

Second strategy for us I call it focus, but in my own mind I think of it as kind of our Mohammed Ali, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee strategy. Pick focused areas of search, really innovate, change those areas, differentiate from the market leader. That doesn’t mean Google won’t come back and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Ballmer says blah a lot.

And last, but not least, we will work to reinvent the user model and the business model. I know this from past experience, it’s often harder for the guy who is market leader to reinvent their category than it is for somebody who is, so to speak, the Avis of the business, number two and trying harder.

Of course, competing in search is all about making a profit from ad dollar$.

We need more relevant ads. It turns out that one of the big advantages the market leader has is they have more advertisers in their system.

You don’t say?

So if you look at two pages today, one from Google and one from Microsoft, the thing that’s perhaps most interesting is, because they have more people bidding on advertising, they have more opportunity to serve up a relevant ad. A lot of our discussion around Yahoo! really centered as much on this issue as any other issue. How do we get enough advertisers to have a pool of advertising to change the whole advertising approach.

Buy AOL, whose Platform-A is the leading online ad network? Pony up the money for Yahoo?

And last, but not least, we’re going to have to invest in search and advertising, in fantastic brand, and fantastic marketing.

That’s two last but not leasts. Not sure which not least is the most not least.

Later, Ballmer handed over the stage to Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President heading up Microsoft’s search, MSN and ad platform engineering efforts.

When it comes to best results, we have to ante up to create the core infrastructure. That allows us to have a very rich index, a deep and broad index, that helps us actually experiment on the relevance improvements, which is a continuous game. You can think of it as, like, drug discovery, where you continuously are in the game of improving your relevance.

So we have made progress on all of those. In fact, if you look at it, last fall is when we reached a huge milestone for us. We increased the index many-fold. Our relevance improved. We today believe we are comparable to the best in the United States when it comes to the core relevance. And that was not something that we could have said last year at this time when you were here. So that’s substantial progress.

Nadella echoed a Yahoo researcher’s recent article on Semantic search. Microsoft acquired semantic search company Powerset earlier this year.

We think the Search experience is going to evolve to really understand the query intent, as well as the document content, in rich ways. So this is where we’re building the algorithm and capabilities to be able to get to that deeper level of semantic understanding, natural language understanding, so that we can really help users of search engines with their tasks, because nobody does queries in isolation. Queries are always done in the context of some task.

Microsoft has big plans for image search:

One of the nice things about our image search is that we’ve been able to sort of take an experience where we have infinite scroll capability, so you can – you don’t have to paginate to be able to see, you know, hundreds of thousands of images. You can just keep going down. And we have a nice experience for infinite scroll here.

Want to refine those images searches? Ok.

We have the ability for you to refine by size. So if I’m looking for a specific size, I can refine that and find that. So in the case I’m looking for some large images, I can look for color. So if I’m looking only for black and white, I can go ahead and hit black and white. And if the demigods smile, I will actually get that. So, in any case, the idea is to be able to have rich filtering capabilities with your image search to get filtering.

The other thing that I can also do is to be able to drag and drop. I can open up the scratch pad and I can go ahead and drag and drop these images and make a new collection, because if I wanted to come back to a collection of images that I used in this project, then I can have a series of collections.

No offense, but that’s not innovative. That’s done by Google and Flock, too.

That’s ok. Let’s just move on to video search.

One of the things that we have done, working with MSR, Microsoft Research, is to do what we’ve done, all of us in the Search business have done for Web search, in terms of creating previews of content before you click on the link. We’ve done that for video. So we crawl all of the videos on the Web.

We created something called the Smart Motion Thumbnails, which, in fact, are basically summaries of video content out there. And we call them Smart Motions because we can actually do scene detection. So if it’s a news clip, we can actually summarize the news clip. If it’s a video of a sports event, we can make sure that we do the scene detection to get the complete shot, and what have you. So this is – so all you have to do is hover over the video. You get the summary before you actually click on it. And this is, again, best in class or first in class when it comes to creating video summaries that are semantically smart.

Just to compare that to what Google has, Google has, you know, a video search product where they have images. They don’t have the summary capability. The one other difference is the selection. If you look at our selection, we have from MSN, AP, MSNBC, you know, and CNBC, ESPN — lots of different sources, as well as YouTube – whereas the selection in video for Google is a lot more biased toward their own owned-and-operated indexes.

Nadella moves on to talk about travel search. This must be part of Ballmer’s ideas about focusing on specific parts of search and innovating them:

Whenever you’re booking a flight, one of the specific things you’re looking for is to time your purchase. We know that airline fares are volatile, so the idea of being able to purchase when we think is the best time to get the best fare is fairly critical. So in this case, if I go ahead and click flights from Seattle to San Francisco, what I do is I get back on something called an Instant Answer. It says that there are many results of flights from Seattle to San Francisco. It also has this prediction algorithm.

Enter in the Farecast acquisition and re-launch.

In this case, it looks like it’s a good time to buy. Let’s go ahead and look at the actual flights. It takes me to something called a Smart Calendar. I can actually pick the date pair, so when I want to leave and when I want to come back. So let’s say I want to leave Thursday and I want to come back on Saturday; I can go ahead and do that. I will hit Find Flights. And at this point, Farecast is going out to all the agencies and all the airlines and bringing back search results that meet the criteria of the dates I picked.

But Microsoft’s plans for the HP Toolbar is where they hope to take some precious market share away from Google.

How do we really get more people to know about Live Search and get the taste for some of the value, like, in particular, the cashback value? So the place where we are innovating is in the toolbar. We have recently done a distribution deal for our toolbar with Hewlett-Packard. So this is the toolbar that Hewlett-Packard will carry with some customizations of their own. It’s the MSN toolbar.

And so let’s say I’m on Google and I type in Xbox. I can go ahead and search for Xbox, and automatically the toolbar detects that you’re searching for Xbox on Google and a Gleam view that there is a cashback on Live Search. And so I can go ahead and at this point click on that Gleam and it’ll take you to Live Search, or it’s supposed to take you to Live Search. Oh, it is on Live Search. See, I didn’t even notice the transfer. So it’s so seamless that now you’re on Live Search. You can get the cashback for a particular Xbox that you want to buy. So that’s just an experiment on how we get the word out, get more users trying Live Search, and getting the value of things like Live Search cashback.

What do you think of Microsoft plans? Can they gain market share? Let it fly in the comments.