Apparently since as early as December, Yahoo has been doing this in four countries: France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

Yahoo told McGee, "As part of Yahoo!’s ongoing effort to build products and services that deliver the best possible experiences for consumers, we are increasing investment in some areas while scaling back in others."

While the move has gone largely unnoticed all year, as Matt points out, it is certainly no secret that Yahoo is "scaling back" in some areas. Yahoo famously put an end to the once huge Geocities a while back, not to mention various other products. Of course, they’re handing search over to Microsoft this year as well (for a while at least).

In Yahoo’s note to McGee, it said the local versions of Yahoo Search are a "superior experience" to the directory experience, but the company said it has no plans to close the U.S. version. Does that mean the U.S. Yahoo Search experience isn’t considered a superior experience to the directory?

Read Yahoo’s whole response at Search Engine Land.

Do you still need the Yahoo Directory? Share your thoughts.

Yahoo Search Marketing seems to be conducting a test run by displaying these images from a company called ImageAdvantage. The images appear on the left side of each of the sponsored listings, a nice move to attract!

What’s the reason behind the move? Is it being done to boost Yahoo! Directory’s income or do they have a plan to spread the changes slowly to other services on their network as well? Further, how displeasing or distracting the images would be to the people who are more interested in finding what they’re looking for rather than some eye-catching sponsored links?

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