Yahoo! (yahoo.com) has changed the look of its homepage.

It now has only has only one filter bar instead of two (to filter your results to News, Finance, etc.). Additionally, when you click More from the homepage, you no longer see a drop-down menu appearing with more filter options.

Instead, you are taken to a page listing Products and Services (Answers, Groups, Shopping, Dating, etc.) to use as filters.

In a related move, the company has also changed the look of its Search.Yahoo.com homepage. Instead of a white background with a search box, it now also displays an image, but is still less distracting than Yahoo.com.

The post Yahoo Updates Look of Search Pages appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

"While the letter makes specific reference to recent allegations against Yahoo, it is intended to set a stronger precedent of transparency for our users and all citizens who could be affected by government requests for user data," the company stated in the blog post.  "As we’ve said before, recent press reports have been misleading; the mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems," the company also asserted in the blog post.

The allegations referred to in the blog post are of Yahoo's scanning of millions of emails of users of its Yahoo Mail (aka Y Mail) service, at the request of a U.S. government security agency. (Different reports refer to different agencies, including the National Security Agency [NSA] and/or the FBI.)

• Reuters - 10/4/16: Exclusive: Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence - sources
• New York Times - 10/5/16: Yahoo Said to Have Aided U.S. Email Surveillance by Adapting Spam Filter
• Fortune - 10/4/16: Google and Microsoft Not Part of NSA Email Scanning Tied to Yahoo

In the letter addressed to Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell touts his company's commitment to "transparency and to protecting the rights of [its] users." However, Bell laments that the "recent new stories have provoked broad speculation about Yahoo's approach," to privacy, and that "we find ourselves unable to respond in detail."

"That speculation results in part from a lack of transparency and because US laws significantly constrain -- and severely punish -- companies' ability to speak for themselves about national security related orders even in ways that do not compromise US government investigations," Bell added.

In the letter, Bell specifically asked Clapper to:

1. confirm whether an order, as described in these media reports, was issued
2. declassify, in whole or in part, such and order, if it exists
3. make a sufficiently detailed public and contextual comment to clarify the alleged facts and circumstances

So far it does not appear that Clapper has complied or otherwise responded to Bell's letter.

The post Yahoo Urges U.S. Government to Release Information Regarding E-Mail Surveillance appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Yahoo has signed an agreement with Google under which, "Google will provide Yahoo with search advertisements ..., web algorithmic search services..., and image search services."

So now, Yahoo will draw some if its web search results, image results, and attendant advertising from Google.

This is nothing new; Yahoo has already been displaying search results provided by Microsoft's Bing since an agreement between those two rivals in 2009. The Yahoo/Microsoft agreement is scheduled to run through 2019. This new Yahoo/Google agreement does not preclude Yahoo from drawing some search results (and advertising) from Microsoft's services.

"Under the Services Agreement, Yahoo has discretion to select which search queries to send to Google and is not obligated to send any minimum number of search queries. The Services Agreement is non-exclusive and expressly permits Yahoo to use any other search advertising services, including its own service, the services of Microsoft Corporation or other third parties."

Details of the Yahoo/Google deal were included in an 8-K filing by Google on October 20. (Public companies are required to file an 8-K with the SEC to reveal information [such as big deals] that would be important for investors to know about.)

According to the the SEC filing, the Yahoo/Google agreement went into effect on October 1, 2015 and is scheduled to run through the end of 2018.

The post Yahoo’s About to Look Even More Like Google appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Access to the cached versions of pages in Yahoo search results (when available) is now hidden behind a less-than-obvious down-arrow to the right of the results' URL. Hovering over the down-arrow brings up the "Cached" pop-up seen in this illustration. (Note that not all results on your results list will include the down-arrow and therefore do not have a cached version available.)

The cached version is, essentially, a copy of a particular Web page that was captured by the search engine's robot when it last visited that page. The copy is stored on the search engine's own server for future reference/retrieval - even if the content on the original page has been altered, deleted, or otherwise becomes unavailable.

This is actually an emulation of a change that Google made some time ago. In neither case it is NOT a change for the better. Previously, both Yahoo and Google visibly listed the Cached link in the location now occupied by the down-arrow (rather than hiding it behind the down-arrow and adding the additional step of hovering over the down-arrow to display and click the link).

The post Yahoo Adopts Worst of Google’s Interface Changes appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

First, Bing and Yahoo no longer recognize the Boolean connector NOT to exclude terms from a search. To exclude a keyword, multiple keywords, or a phrase, you must type a minus sign immediately to the left of each term you want to exclude. For example, If you wanted to search for results that included President Barack Obama and Iraq but wanted to exclude results that included Angela Merkel, Germany, and Iran, you would enter your search into the Bing (or Yahoo) search box this way:

"Barack Obama" Iraq -"Angela Merkel" -Germany -Iran

Previously, you could use the minus sign in this way or preceed the terms you wanted to exclude with the Boolean connector NOT (in all caps). Bing and Yahoo no longer recognize the NOT Boolean connector.

Second, you can once again exclude results from a particular site (or multiple sites) from your Bing and Yahoo search results. For example, if you wanted to locate Web pages that included information about President Barack Obama and Iraq but did not want to see any results from the Web sites of The Washington Post or Newsweek, you would enter your search into the Bing (or Yahoo) search box this way:

"Barack Obama" Iraq -site:www.washingtonpost.com -site:www.newsweek.com

Owner's of the 13th edition of the new "The Cybersleuth's Guide to the Internet" (IFL Press, 2015) book should update these functions as discussed on pages 52 and 77, respectively. Owners of earlier editions may want to check the index to see where these concepts are discussed.

The post Yahoo! and Bing Make Changes to Their Exclusionary Search Connector appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Reuters reported that the outages were caused "after Microsoft pushed out a bad code update and then struggled to roll it back."

Engadget reported that: "Because Redmond's roll-back didn't work, it had to turn off groups of linked servers to get back to the point where things were working as they did pre-crash."

Yahoo! was affected because its search has been powered by Microsoft's Bing search engine since 2009, under a 10-year agreement. In a brief written statement, a Microsoft spokesman confirmed the outage, to Reuters but declined to comment on the cause. Yahoo did not immediately respond to reporters' requests for comment.

Other Microsoft cloud services like Outlook.com, Hotmail.com, Live.com, and the Cortana virtual assistant from the company's mobile phones were also affected.

The post Bing Goes Down: Takes Yahoo! With It appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

The death notice was short and to the point. In the post, Rossiter said:

Yahoo was started nearly 20 years ago as a directory of websites that helped users explore the Internet. While we are still committed to connecting users with the information they’re passionate about, our business has evolved and at the end of 2014 (December 31), we will retire the Yahoo Directory. Advertisers will be upgraded to a new service; more details to be communicated directly.

The post Yahoo! Kills Yahoo! | Directory That Launched The Search Engine Set to Disappear at the End of 2014 appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

1995

2013

On that day, Yahoo, which acquired the pioneering search engine as part of its 2003 purchase of Overture, began redirecting all traffic to the altavista.com domain to a custom Yahoo search page.

Altavista was launched in December of 1995 by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and grew to become the (early) Internet's most popular and most powerful search engine.

Many search engine features and innovations associated with Google like a minimalist interface and free services (such as Babel Fish) were first pioneered by Altavista.

Mis-steps and missed opportunities through a series of corporate mergers and acquisitions, lead to the company's decline in popularity. Yahoo took control of the search engine in 2003.

The post Yahoo Kills Altavista appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Yahoo! does still recognize an asterisk as a proximity connector representing the concept of "within one word." To conduct a "within one word" search at Yahoo!, the search would be expressed as follows: "Mark * Rosch" (including the quotation marks).

We have updated our Search Engine Features Comparison Chart to reflect this change.

The post Yahoo! Drops Proximity Connector appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

In our live Continuing Legal Education seminars, we teach lawyers how to use the lesser known, advanced, and sometimes hidden features of search engines to conduct more effective investigative, background, and legal research on the Internet.

We use Google as a stand-in for "EverySearchEngine" (sort of like "Everyman") in these live MCLE seminars for two reasons. First, many of the features initially introduced by Google have been adopted by other major search engines. Second, because Google is the most popular search engine in the English language it is most likely that the attendees will be familiar with the look, feel, and navigation used in the examples we present. We do also point out some major differences between Google and Bing and Yahoo.

SearchEngineJournal has done a nice job of compiling statistics about the percentage of search traffic handled by Google versus its two most popular competitors. (It should be noted, that with Microsoft's 2009 investment in Yahoo, Yahoo's organic search results are delivered by Bing. The results of a Bing search and Yahoo search are the same. So, the individual market shares of Bing and Yahoo could be combined to show a 28.99% market share for the combination - still less than half of Google's market share.)

Source: Comparison of the Top Three Search Engines: Bing+Yahoo > Google? [INFOGRAPHIC]

The post Google as “Everyman” | Why We Use Google as Stand-in for “Every Search Engine” appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.