Lately I’ve noticed issues with email delivery to my Yahoo Mail account. Sometimes emails are delivered on time, but many are delivered late. And the delayed delivery seems to vary – I can’t put my finger on it. Even the exact same email can be delivered in real-time on one test but another test takes half a day to arrive.  At first I thought it was only emails coming from Rackspace servers as they noted there was an issue a couple of weeks ago with mail delivery. But this past week, the delayed email delivery seems to be coming from all sides.

One interesting note – mail that gets forwarded from my gMail account always seems to come immediately. The same message sent directly to my Yahoo Mail account sometimes is delayed.

Yesterday it caused an issue as newer emails showed up before the previous emails which made for a very odd exchange with a client.

Do you use Yahoo Mail? If so, have you noticed any delivery delays over the past few weeks?

If you read CN regularly, you know that I always do my best to grab schwag for all of you that couldn’t make it to the event. I was able to grab the following:

• sheets of stickers as seen below – there are so many stickers on each sheet that I am going to cut the sheets in half so more of you can have them
• a tshirt – I went with Women’s Medium size

If you’d like either of the above, send your address to general-at-centernetworks-d-o-t-com. I will ship anywhere in the world. The stickers are first come first serve and the tshirt winner will be randomly selected on Monday.

Here’s Yahoo’s description of Hack Days: “Yahoo! Hack Days started back in 2005, when a team of engineers designed an event to see what sort of interesting and innovative applications people would build using Yahoo! tools and technologies over a 24-hour period. At the end of the day, they presented working hacks to roomful of colleagues and peers. Since then, “hack” has become an integral part of culture at Yahoo!. ”

The sessions run through the night and you can nap at the conference center. They say there will be lots of “geek food” – let’s just hope they don’t bring any Twitter cupcakes – we all know how those ended up for me :)

I am hoping we will learn why we should use Yahoo tools and developer platforms over their Google counterparts.

When you want to attach a file up to 100mb to a Yahoo email, the Attach Large File app creates a drop.io share, uploads the file to it, and attaches a link to the drop.io share inside of the email. In my testing, the application worked well.

The drop.io team notes that the app was built on top of the drop.io API. The app is a default and is available directly in the “applications” menu inside of Yahoo Mail. While I don’t see using the service for uploading a simple image or Word doc, for larger videos or photos it could work very well. And the offering should provide more visibility for drop.io to a mainstream audience.

Here’s a video overview of how the Attach Large Files application works:

Related: Three alternatives to WebEx

Sometime last month the default “server not found” page that my ISP provides seemed to change again. The page says it’s powered by Yahoo Search. But after a handful of tests over the weekend, it seems like it’s more a page of ads than anything else. I showed the page to a couple of “regular” Internet users and both were confused as to the provided results. Most people today know that ads on search are separated from the organic results.

What I was provided with by my ISP is some sort of combined ads and organic search results into one result set. In fact on some searches, organic results were nowhere to be found on the first page. What makes this even more odd is that the numbering for the results continues from the paid “sponsored” ads to the organic results.  

Here are a few examples (click to view larger images):

In this example, the domain googl23.com was not found. I was redirected to the ISP search page which displays 9 results – all “sponsored” – no organic results whatsoever and no ability to move to another page. Some of the paid results seem to have nothing to do with Google – car engine parts, high paying jobs with no work needed, and electrical engineering information.

Here we did a search using the search box on the page for Flickr. We get 8 results, first 3 are sponsored and the same pattern follows on all pages. As you can see here, the numbers move from 1-8 with no clear break between paid ads and organic results. What makes this example even more odd is that the first result is for Mike Bloomberg who is running for NYC mayor.

This last example comes from clicking one of the related terms on the Flickr results page above. It’s interesting that apartments, personals and cheap airfares are somehow related to Flickr. I clicked digital photography. Here we see a page with 9 paid search results and then results 10-14 are organic (I think).

It’s a shame that they call the results “web search results” when so much of the page is filled with ads. I understand that this source of income is very important for an ISP however a bit of separation is absolutely required. Sadly I think we will see more of these inline results ads in the future.

There are lots of people on Twitter who have also had issues accessing the mail service.

As always, please report in if Yahoo Mail is down for you.

Update: 7:45pm – it appears Yahoo Mail is back to normal.

Their “lifeboat” is a new offering they are near completion on which will allow Geocities users to transfer their sites into Jimdo. The basic Jimdo service is free and you can upgrade to JimdoPro for $5/month. JimdoPro offers more detailed statistics, larger storage space, personalized domain name, and no ads.

They are offering Geocities’ (and Google Pages) users 10% off the JimdoPro fee. This is a smart move for Jimdo as it makes them look like heros for helping users of a system that is closing.

Here’s the lists from the News category:

Some other fun bits….

• How to tie a tie = most popular how-to search on AOL
• AOL says Las Vegas was the most searched U.S. city for travel – NYC placed 5th
• Yahoo shows Jamie Lynn Spears moving up in the celebrity category – hey a teenage pregnancy and a baby daddy will do it every time!
• In Yahoo’s "influential women" category – mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano beat out Michelle Obama
• Heath Ledger and Bernie Mac lead Yahoo’s dead people category

comScore

For all of the countries in the chart below, Google leads usage of mobile search. In the U.S., 63% of mobile searches use Google while 34% use Yahoo. In Germany, 85% use Google and in France 62% use Google. Spain and France were the only countries that had near 10% MSN search usage. 

Compete is out with their latest analysis report — this time it’s regarding the online Olympics coverage across the Web. NBC spent $900 million for exclusive rights for broadcasting the olympics so an easy assumption would be that they lead the online traffic and engagement race for the Beijing Olympics online viewing but Compete says that assumption would be incorrect.

As you can see in the chart below, Compete measured reach (unique visitors) between the top 5 Olympic coverage sites. Yahoo leads with 1.5 million unique visitors while NBC comes in with 1.2 million. NBC leads in engagement (time on site) by 5% over Yahoo. It will be interesting to see how long the traffic and engagement remains high at NBC and the others once the games have concluded.

From a CenterNetworks perspective, the Olympics have provided a good stream of traffic since the opening ceremonies. The traffic has slowed over the past few days but during the first three days we were doing quite well. In fact, in my traffic and ranking analysis, Techcrunch would win the Gold and we would take the Silver. I will note that we have asked the IOC to take a look to make sure that no “faking” (heightening, lip synching, etc.) went on with that valley blog.

The one question I have after reviewing the Compete analysis is whether it includes views and engagement through the Microsoft Silverlight player which is required to watch the Olympics coverage on NBC.

The NY Daily News is one of the most popular of the linked sites — probably due to its entertainment content. Yahoo also noted that Yahoo Buzz has been a big driver to the newspaper Web sites as well. This also makes sense as Yahoo Buzz is big with entertainment, celebrity and general business news.

Dallasnews.com reports that when featured on the Yahoo home page, it has driven over 800,000 visits in a day.

Yahoo News goes head-to-head with Google News. Google News is a favorite for techies. Some of the newspapers involved in the program include: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Herald, Chicago Sun-Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Rocky Mountain News, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News and The Tampa Tribune.

comScore

German networks Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck and ProSiebenSat1 Sites own 4.6% share combined.

It’s interesting to compare the numbers to the Russian search engine comScore report. In Russia, local search provider Yandex owns nearly 50% of the search market.

On Monday we released our May Search Share numbers. As a result of some conversations we were having with Danny Sullivan in parallel we sent over our “rules” we use to mine the search data. Danny threw these up on his post reviewing our data and one savvy reader very quickly identified an issue with our rules. So, long story short, we have fixed our Yahoo! rules (and also reevaluated all the other engine rules in the process). Here’s the updated data based on adjusted rules.

According to the revised market share numbers, a MSFT/Yahoo Search combination would yield:

Yahoo+MSN/Live = 28.5% combined market share (revised)
Yahoo+MSN/Live = 23.9% (old)

However, as Jeremy points out in his post, trend wise not much has changed. Yahoo Search market share is still trending downwards.

I’m sure folks at Microsoft (and Wall Street) have been watching these numbers closely (along with those from comScore, Hitwise, etc). This revision certainly makes Yahoo worth more, but is it enough for Microsoft to change its mind? Only time will tell.

CORRECTED STATS:

OLD STATS:

Jay Meattle leads all things "Product" at Lookery, an online advertising and user-targeting network. Before Lookery, Jay was the Product Manager of Compete.com, where he managed the overall development and growth of the award winning competitive web intelligence service. You can find him at http://www.hepguru.com/blog.

Question: Do you think there are opps for partner sites to bypass Yahoo and go directly to Google.

Sue: It’s fair to say that our current publisher partners are included in this agreement. It’s our choice and their choice. The deal does not extend to new partners, we will continue to service them with Panama.

Question: What percentage of search queries do you expect to show Google ads on?

Sue: the $800 million opp in monetization in usa and canada is just for the queries where we believe there is monetization potential. We don’t know yet which individual queries and we hold full power over which queries to select.

Question: Why should we use Yahoo when we can buy from Google and get both?

Sue: The flexibility of this deal lets us optimize the best ads and we have the flexibility to optimize every single day to decide what inventory will be seen.

Jerry Yang – Clearly it is time to move on and we believe this deal with Google does just that. Our strategy at Yahoo is to capture the online advertising market. We view our open strategy as a key to this partnership’s success. We’ve entered into an non-exclusive agreement with Google to show Google advertising on our search results. The deal is 10 years along with 4 years initial and 2-3 year terms. It applies to U.S. and Canada only. This deal will increase revenue for Yahoo and enhance our position as a leader in advertising.

In the first 12 mos after implementation, we expect 250-450 million in incremental revenue and believe it 800 million in annual revenue where query monetization exists. It could come from search and/or non-search Yahoo products.  It will strengthen our competitive position in search and display. It also helps to extend our open extension and towards an open marketplace.

Sue Decker – We’re really excited about the deal we are announcing today. The deal is all about flexibility and let’s us do what we do best and enhances our options. It helps us to decide when we show Google ads and our Panama search advertising. We will be able to show Yahoo ads when we can offer more value. We get to select how much Google ads we run and we maintain control in how to show them on our sites. We improve our access to paid search. These added financial resources will help us to capitalize where we are best to compete, win and add value.

She talks about SearchMonkey and the other exciting announcements that have come out over the past few weeks. We will also see interoperability of Yahoo and Google’s IM clients.

Jerry – we’ve done something very important here. I believe this puts Yahoo on a faster track to creating shareholder value. This is just one step – we will continue to evaluate everything as we move forward. I believe we have the right assets, strategy and team to maximize stockholder value over time.