Yahoo! at one time the king of search and email, but those days are long gone. The recent executive changes at the top have made no difference. Yahoo continues to struggle and for more than just popularity among users, but functionality. Lately, the problems have escalated to the point that Yahoo has lost control of the issues at hand. Today, try loading email or moving around your email inbox, it takes forever or it does nothing. Yahoo needs to get back that swagger it once had, but for now just fix the problems with the site!

As of this writing, Yahoo email is still crawling like a snail and you can’t move emails to folders, download attachments or load the financial page. I browsed around Yahoo and didn’t see any news about an issue since 7:00 AM Central Time when the problem started.

Yahoo also needs to moderate their comment section for all their blogs and news articles. I have seen so much spam about dating services and products that it really distracts users from those comments that provide opinion and commentary. Does Yahoo even care about who’s gaming their site? This has been an ongoing issue for years and it looks like Yahoo is the new playground for blackhat SEO and unethical marketing.

What’s with the biased sports writers? You can love your team, but to bash teams you don’t like all the time will push fans away. This has been common practice with a couple of writers (not mentioning names). A writer should be neutral and write for the target audience. Put it this way, if it wasn’t for the New York sports teams, Yahoo sports writers would have little to write about.

What disturbed be this past year was when Yahoo removed site explorer. Why? It was a very useful part of the site and for many marketing and web owners it was a great tool.

My rant of the day!

Posted 4 hours after this blog was published came some bad news for Yahoo – Four Yahoo! board members including chairman leaving

It looks like the favorite soft drink company has interest in Yahoo. It seems like a coincidence being that both the brands sound closely similar and are close in spelling, but why would Yoo-hoo want to get into the search space?

This makes no sense or at least it seems odd, but in this day and age of the dot com’s anything is possible. The press release was posted earlier this morning and it has some investors scratching their heads wondering why a company who makes a soft drink would want to get into the search business.

Yahoo has been struggling trying to keep pace with Google, but it looks like Yahoo may have thrown in the towel. Since Carol Bartz took over as CEO of Yahoo, things haven’t gone to plan and Yahoo continues to lose market share in search.

I wonder if Bartz owns a significant amount of shares in Yoo-hoo. At one time and I am not sure if this is still the case, but Yogi Berra owned a substantial share of Yoo-hoo.

Read the full press release

Yahoo for Yoo-hoo! I am sure there will be a lot of Yoo-hoo ads running on Yahoo.

This Firefox extension is a must have for all blog and website owners. It’s important to know how certain keywords are ranking in the most popular search engines.

SEOBook offers a free Firefox Rank Checker extension to easily check your website rankings in Google (US and international), Yahoo, and Microsoft Live search.

It’s easy to use! Enter your domain, keyword, click on Add and click on Start. You can even enter multiple keywords if you like. You can also export results to a CSV file. This is important to determine how well your keywords are doing on a Monthly basis.

You can easily launch this tool by clicking on the icon located in your browsers status bar at the bottom.

Download Firefox Rank Checker by visiting http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/.

It looks like talks are back on with Yahoo on a potential deal for Microsoft to buyout the struggling search company. It has not been a week since Yahoo found their new CEO Carol Bartz. Microsoft’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, met with Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock in New York this week, according to a report in The New York Times.

The newspaper cited an unnamed source who had been briefed on the meeting, but no details of the conversation have been released.

Yahoo’s appointment of Carol Bartz as chief executive has heightened speculation that the companies may be able to agree on a takeover, with Microsoft possibly acquiring Yahoo’s search engine business.

The news follows reports of an informal conversation between Bartz and Ballmer after she was selected by Yahoo’s board.

Jerry Yang, who has stepped down as the head of Yahoo, let a deal with Microsoft fall through last year, angering many of the company’s investors.

Yahoo didn’t immediately return a call for comment, and Microsoft declined to comment.

Will Microsoft finally get what they wanted for more than a year? I believe there’s a better chance now that Jerry Yang is no longer making the calls for Yahoo.

Yahoo Inc. co-founder and Chief Executive Jerry Yang will step down after the company finds a replacement. It was a great run for this innovator and a ride he will never forget. Yahoo, Inc. is still the #1 search engine today and it has been aggressively challenge by Google. What’s next for Yahoo now? I for one am curious to see who will fill those big shoes of Mr. Yang.

Mr. Yang has been taking a lot of heat lately from the board and from Microsoft. Activist investor Carl Icahn said he would replace Mr. Yang as CEO if his proxy campaign succeeded. After Yahoo agreed to a truce with Mr. Icahn, allowing him to join the board, shareholder resentment lingered.

Mr. Yang stayed on, arguing that he was the best person to help Yahoo turn it around. That became increasingly difficult as the board was unwilling to abandon the notion that a deal with Microsoft could yet be struck, said people familiar with the matter. And while Mr. Yang is not opposed to a deal, and recently said publicly that he thought Microsoft should try to buy Yahoo, his relationship with Microsoft has been strained by months of tense negotiations.

A person familiar with Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer’s thinking said that the Microsoft chief is still interested in buying Yahoo’s search business, which could help the software company with the critical task of ratcheting up its market share against Google Inc.

On Monday, Yahoo shares closed at $10.63 a share. A far cry from the $31 a share Microsoft offered on January 31, 2008.

Farewell Jerry, you made a difference for all of us.

Google announced Wednesday that it is ending its effort towards a search advertising partnership with Yahoo.

After four months of struggling with advertisers and government regulators who voiced competitive and antitrust concerns about the deal, the company said in a blog post that continuing the effort is not in the best interests of Google or its users. The proposed deal would have seen Yahoo running Google advertisements in its search results.

Now that the Google-Yahoo deal is finished–before it even started–Jerry Yang & Co. will take a revenue hit. According to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, Yahoo would have reaped revenue of about $665 million under the revised Google ad deal with operating cash flow of $200 million to $350 million.

There was a rumor that Yang would step down and Microsoft would buy Yahoo. The company has denied the rumor, which was reported by VentureBeat.

I am still betting on Microsoft to buy out Yahoo for a much lower price than initially offered. Yahoo needs to do something fast or it will be left struggling to compete with Google.

Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account was Hacked on Tuesday by an activist group known as ‘anonymous’, according to a Web site that publishes leaked documents alleging government and corporate misconduct.

Anonymous gained access to Palin’s Yahoo e-mail address on Tuesday evening and gave the information to Wikileaks, according to the Web site. Data shared included screen shots of Palin’s inbox, two e-mails, her address book and several family photos.

Though the Yahoo account, gov.palin@yahoo.com as well as the unrelated gov.sarah@palin.com, have since been deleted, Wikileaks has made the data available on its Web site via zip files.

The screenshots feature a July e-mail between Palin and Alaska Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell, an e-mail sent to Palin staffer Ivy Frye from an anonymous member telling her that Palin’s password had been changed, captures of Palin’s inbox, and an e-mail from Amy McCorkell, who serves on the Governor’s Advisory Board on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse.

Where is the security?

Intel today launched a system-on-a-chip (SoC) for digital television, and said it has partnered with Yahoo in building software that brings the Web to the TV screen.

Media Processor CE 3100, launched at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, is the first of a family of SoCs for consumer electronics, a market that Intel is aggressively trying to corner and own the majority of the market share.

The CE 3100 offers more than just TV, and is adaptable to other consumer electronics, such as high-definition DVD players and cable set-top boxes. The SoC includes Intel’s new media processor, formerly codenamed Canmore that handles HD video, home-theater quality audio and 3D graphics. Consumer electronics makers Samsung Electronics and Toshiba will be among the first companies to use the new technology.

Intel claims its offering is better for software developers, since they can use the same tools available for building applications for Intel’s other x86 processors commonly found in the PC world. Intel plans to ship CE 3100 next month.

Yahoo is among the first companies to build software on top of the new SoC.

Yahoo Buzz, like Digg is a rating service where you can submit stories and rate other stories. Buzz went live on Tuesday and many bloggers lined up to submit stories of their own.

The goal is to get as much positive ratings so you can hit the sweet spot, the ‘front page’. Easier said than done, but with enough friends and fans you can get there.

“What does this mean for you? Anything you find on the Web is now buzzable,” Tapan Bhat, senior vice president of front doors, communities, and network services at Yahoo, wrote in a blog post.

Any webmaster will now be able to add the “Buzz Up” button to their Web site, Bhat wrote. If a reader wants to Buzz an article that does not have the Buzz button attached, they can submit it directly on the Yahoo Buzz Web site.

The more unique and compelling the story, the better chance your story of choice will buzz up to the Yahoo homepage.

The possibility of landing on the Yahoo homepage is the main difference between Buzz and competitor Digg. PC Magazine and its blogs were among the 100 sites that participated in the alpha trial for the service when it launched in February, and that participation has garnered a few healthy bumps in traffic.

Add the Buzz button to your web site and have your stories Buzzed up!

When is this all going to end? This battle for a take over will go on for a long time or until Yahoo’s board gets ousted.

As described by Yahoo in a statement released late Saturday, Microsoft packaged its latest offer with activist investor Carl Icahn, a billionaire who is seeking to overthrow Yahoo’s board of directors in a shareholder meeting scheduled for Aug. 1.

Without providing many specifics, Yahoo said Microsoft renewed an earlier bid to buy the company’s search engine and proposed turning over the remaining pieces to a board controlled by Icahn.

Yahoo said it received the complex proposal Friday and was given less than 24 hours to respond.

Backed into a corner, Yahoo lashed out in a blunt manner likely to inject even more bad blood into its already venomous relationship with Microsoft and Icahn.

“It is ludicrous to think that our board could accept such a proposal,” Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock said in the statement.

Hang in there Bostock, show Microsoft who’s the boss!