I have been tracking forum discussions for years now and one thing I have been noticing over the past several months is how Yahoo! has been losing a lot of the internal forum buzz. Let me clarify that this does not apply to the Yahoo! Search Marketing or Yahoo! Publisher Network side of things, but rather the Yahoo! Search organic side. The forum buzz, to me, it seems, is at an all time low.
Who is to blame here? I don't know? Is Yahoo! not exciting anymore? Does Yahoo! not send enough qualified organic traffic for it to matter to SEMs? Is the lack of some old and well-known search representatives participation in the community having an impact? Is it that Yahoo! Search results seem to be not as relevant as the competitors? Is it all of them?
One personal result that bothers me is that a search on rustybrick doesn't list rustybrick.com as number one. Google seems to have no problems with it, MSN gets it kinda right, Ask.com does a superb job (I even got binoculars). Some people are blaming the recent Yahoo! Search issues to an RSS handling issue but I see enough evidence to prove that wrong sometimes and sometimes not wrong (depends on when you search - which is bad, really bad.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, named Is Yahoo! Web Search Losing Its Fire?
