WebProNews received an email from them, and a spokesperson tells us, "VideoSurf is taking video search to the next level." He mentioned the following highlights:

- Improved search results – new methods to weed out irrelevant videos, spam and misleading thumbnails (did you know that 20% of all videos on the Web are spam?)

- People in the Spotlight – be entertained with videos of the most popular personalities on the Web, and discover related videos

- Homepage re-design that lets you discover videos that are related to what the world is buzzing about on Twitter, Google, etc.

That relevancy is probably the thing that people care most about when it comes to video search. Frankly it’s been an issue that has plagued video search in general.

"Search is what we do here," says  Margo Brockman on the VideoSurf blog.  It’s what we have a team of world renowned mathematicians constantly iterating on and tirelessly working to improve.  Our goal is always the same: better, more relevant results for your searches and a faster way to connect you to the videos you want to watch. 

The new release of VideoSurf is also designed to "attack" spam. The company says that over 20% of videos on the web are spam, and they have responded to this by improving the way they use their vision technology to automatically detect spam videos and algorithmically devalue them in their rankings before they make it onto the results page.

"Because other video sites are unable to see the video content, they can’t know that their users are being misled," explains Margo. "VideoSurf however, is able visually identify the problem and boost the video down in our search rankings automatically. We even take it a step further. If we need to show this video in our search results, VideoSurf is able to automatically correct the inaccurate thumbnail so that the leading thumbnail we show is more representative of what the video is actually about (all this in addition to showing you all the most important scenes in our Visual Summary)."

Margo provides the following example screenshot with a comparison between YouTube and VideoSurf results:

Youtube:

 VideoSurf:

 Duplicate videos often plague video search, and VideoSurf has this under control too. The company’s "Computer Vision technology" recognizes duplicate videos and groups them together to improve relevancy and save the user time.

"Other video site’s deduplication technology relies on matching up titles and start/stop times," explains Margo. "It’s not their fault; that’s all they have to work with. However, our ability to see inside videos lets us take this a step further. VideoSurf is able to identify each video’s unique visual DNA and match it against others in the index."

Features of VideoSurf’s new homepage include a hot searches feature, which pulls the most searched for terms across the web, the people in the spotlight feature, which is a collection of the most searched for people on the web, which if I understand correctly is in real time, and the Watchboxes feature, which appears to just be a featured videos section.

Have you tried the new VideoSurf yet? If so, let us know what you think of it.

A search for a musician might bring up some of these same types of results, but might replace stats, schedules, and rosters with album reviews, concert tickets, LastFM tracks, etc.

At this point in time, Yahoo Glue is not going to work for all searches. For example, there is no Glue Page for me.

Evidently I haven’t achieved the level of stardom of a Madonna. Writers are not excluded though. They have Stephen King and Robert Scoble. Julie Demsey at the Yahoo Search Blog explains:

We’re starting with a limited set of topics (more will be added over time), pulling together content from the best places on the Web onto one Yahoo! Glue page. These pages are built using an algorithm that automatically places the most relevant modules on a page, giving you a visually rich, diverse page all about the topic in which you’re interested…

For those that may be wondering, our intention with Yahoo! Glue beta is not to replace the Yahoo! Search experience in the US. We’re always challenging ourselves to explore innovative new ways to deliver great experiences. Glue is one of those experiments, with a goal of giving users one more visual way to browse and discover new things from across the Web. We’ll be working to expand the number of Glue pages, improve the experience and incorporate your feedback into future versions.

Yahoo originally toyed with the Glue Pages concept with Yahoo India. The pages retrieved from Yahoo Glue will certainly have value to users, but I think it’s going to depend a lot on how Yahoo integrates the service into everyday Yahoo use when it comes to attracting a mainstream audience.

Google itself has emphasized time and time again that this deal is good for competition, and will not hamper Yahoo’s advertising offering. Yahoo has been relatively quiet on the issue in comparison, leaving most of the defensive tactics up to Google. Google has put up a website dedicated to the "facts" about the deal, and their lawyers are even calling advertisers asking for testimonials for the deal.

Yahoo Search Marketing has implemented a new system for geo-targeting so users can better pinpoint their target markets. Users can now select targets as wide as an entire country, and as narrow as a single zip code. According to Zachary Rodgers at ClickZ, who notes that Yahoo’s geo-targeting offering trumps Google’s who only offers it down to the city level:

In a statement that seemed crafted to address the DOJ’s concerns, Yahoo said the new features are "reinforcing its commitment to be a leader in search."

Greg Sterling, founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, noted it’s unlikely Yahoo undertook its enhancements to appease U.S. investigators. However, he said the move may serve to kill two birds with one stone — convincing both advertisers and investigators that it still means to provide a serious alternative to Google.

Further evidence to support this notion (aside from Yahoo saying flat-out that they intend to invest the money they make from the Google deal into their own ad platform) is the incorporation of SearchMonkey applications into general Yahoo search results. This seems to be nothing more than an attempt to boost relevancy in the way Google tries to do with their own applications showing up in results (like Google Finance and News for example).

Yahoo’s latest attempt at social media seems to indicate an additional component of a strategy to bolster use. This attempt has been the object of criticism (unsurprisingly considering Yahoo’s past endeavors into social media), but you might say the social aspect could lead to increased relevancy as a whole too. User engagement (via social elements) can potentially lead to the sharing of relevant information between friends. After all, who knows the user better than their own friends (kind of Facebook’s mentality with Beacon).

These are the kinds of things I believe Yahoo is looking at as firepower when it comes to competition with Google, Microsoft, and anyone else in the long run. The search game has long been a quest for relevancy, and Yahoo is banking on opening up their services in more ways than one to achieve this (no matter how many jobs they cut).

However, no matter how much they improve relevancy, they still have to overcome Google – the brand. Yahoo has a brand too. There’s no question about that, but Google has become synonmous with "search" for many (even as a verb).

But back to the geo-targeting. Kastle Waserman, Communications Manager at Yahoo notes the relevancy as the goal of this type of marketing. "Keep in mind the more you target, the fewer users your ads may reach," says Waserman. "Generally, you’re trading relevancy for volume, narrowing your target to a specific audience rather than every potential eyeball in the overall market."

To access the new features, Yahoo tells users to:

- Click the “Campaigns” tab.

– Choose a campaign.

– Click the “Campaign Settings” drop-down located in the upper right-hand corner (above the graph).

– Select “Geo-Targeting.”

At that point, you can select your target from a drop-down menu accompanied by a map that shows the areas you are selecting.

Not all marketing campaigns will call for the relevancy delivered from a geo-targeted campaign. After all, some products are potentially relevant to people everywhere. That said, geo-targeting can be an incredibly useful weapon in an Internet marketer’s arsenal, and the more precision offered from any provider of geo-targeting services, the better chance that marketer will have of achieving success with that campaign.

Unfortunately for users of Yahoo Search Marketing, Google still dominates the search market share by a wide margin, and to the best of my knowledge, the Google deal doesn’t include serving Yahoo ads on Google’s search engine.

Update: According to this page for holiday tips, Google actually will let you geo-target down to a neighborhood level rather than only the city-level as indicated here.

SearchMonkey is Yahoo Search’s open platform, which allows developers and site owners to make results more useful and relevant on a personalized basis. Developers can build their apps with SearchMonkey, then use it themselves and/or share them with others, but they typically have to be turned on by users. That’s the significance of this news. Yahoo has deemed these apps worthy of improving their own search results and has implemented them on their own for all Yahoo Search users to enjoy.

It is not unlike what Google does, except that these apps are coming from third parties. "While Google tends to integrate data from its own products like Google Finance, Images, or Maps into its search results, Yahoo is staying true to its promise of ‘open search,’" says Frederic Lardinois at Read Write Web. "Yahoo started to integrate SearchMonkey results in June, but back then, users still had to enable them one by one. Now, Yahoo is starting to surface more results from trusted SearchMonkey apps in its standard results."

Yahoo also gave a shout out to some other apps on display at the Yahoo Search Gallery (where users can browse SearchMonkey-based projects), such as Infobar for TV.com, and Infobar for Food Network. "We’re pleased with all of the new apps that have been developed and we’re looking forward to what new ideas and innovations the development community will come up with," says a post on the Yahoo Search Blog from the SearchMonkey Team.

I think Yahoo’s attempts to open up the search experience are very interesting and have the potential to keep them in the game, but they are so far behind Google in terms of market share right now, it’s going to be hard to play catch-up. I’d say this is a step in the right direction either way.

Implementing SearchMonkey features on their own for wide use by the average Yahoo user shows that they’re willing to do so with good apps. This should provide developers with encouragement for building more creative and useful ones now that they know it’s possible to get them to become part of normal Yahoo search results. And the more inventive and creative ways to bring relevancy to results that are created, the more reasons there will be to use the search engine. They’ve still got some hurdles to jump though. Do you think this is a significant step for Yahoo?

In performing certain search queries, Google appears to be inserting the date of the page in front of the Snippet. I just performed one search and 5 of the 10 results had dates preceding their Snippets. One of them had the date towards the end of the Snippet.

Of the 6 dates shown, all were within the past 10 days with the exception of a Press Release from 2007.

Gray has posted a screenshot of his results:

There’s no question that when this feature becomes widespread, it will help users determine the relevancy of some results to their searches. Newer results are often more relevant than older ones. In fact this is probably the case more often than not. It’s not true all of the time though. Personally, I would like to see the ability to toggle between sort "by relevancy" and "by date" similar to the way Google News is set up. The newest is not always the most relevant. Listing the date is definitely not a bad idea either way. At the very least, users will be able to get an idea of what they’re in for without having to click on a result to find out it’s 6 years old.

Search Engine Land has also found that Google seems to be classifying categories of posts, with the dates seeming to be attached to newsy articles, and forum threads showing the number of posts along with the "last post" date. That makes things a bit more interesting. If they can do this with blog posts and show the number of comments along with a "last commented on" date, this could actually be a huge improvement for relevancy. Like I talked about in this article, the amount of user engagement is a pretty good indication of relevancy. The more people talking about it, the more people it is obviously relevant to.

Of course there are still going to be variables to that concept, like comment spam, and lack of good marketing. There could be an excellent blog post out there that nobody knows about because they’ve never heard of the blog. But nevertheless, the concept would still be beneficial to users to help them better choose which results to click on in any given search. I’m looking forward to seeing how far Google takes this.

- Have other relevant sites link to yours.

– Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Those points are now gone in what would appear to be a slap in the face of directories, but SEO folks are the ones really irritated. Google doesn’t appear to see it as a slap in the face so much, but more of simply a non-needed guideline.

Barry Schwartz points to a quote from Google’s John Mueller in a Google Groups thread:

"I wouldn’t necessarily assume that we’re devaluing Yahoo’s links, I just think it’s not one of the things we really need to recommend," said Mueller. "If people think that a directory is going to bring them lots of visitors (I had a visitor from the DMOZ once), then it’s obviously fine to get listed there. It’s not something that people have to do though ."

Mueller also asks for feedback, "What do you think – does it make sense? What else should we change / add / remove?"

Regardless of what guidelines are on the page, a relevant link is a relevant link. There are still directories like our own eBusiness Directory that don’t offer paid links, and keep the listings quality without getting flooded by spammy and irrelevant ones by using a strict human-edited approval process (call it a shameless plug if you want, but it’s the truth).

There is going to be a lot of outrage over this, but is it really necessary? Perhaps too much focus has been put on directories like DMOZ anyway.