Ground Report

 November 23, 2011

Yahoo Site Explorer officially went offline at midnight PST on November 21, closing the service around the world and reaching Sydney early this morning. 

Yahoo announced over a year ago that the Site Explorer service would close as a result of its recent agreement with Microsoft to have the Bing search engine replace all Yahoo web search functions.

 Online for six years, the Site Explorer was a mainstay in the SEO toolbox of website owners and SEO professionals, who kept track of backlinks to competitors’ websites using the Yahoo free tool. 

 Site Explorer also listed the number of pages a website had indexed by the Yahoo search engine and allowed users to enter the URLs of pages not indexed.

The demise of Site Explorer has sent internet marketers to paid subscription services to find the coveted backlink information they need.  Conversation in the SEO world is heating up over alternative sources of information.

One SEO blog posted a eulogy to Site Explorer.   Internet marketer Barry Schwartz commented, "It is basically the last nail in the coffin for Yahoo Search."

Yahoo/Bing now garners about 11% of the search market.  This is a far distant second to Google’s 83% of market share.

Though the Yahoo Site Explorer received a huge amount of website traffic, Yahoo never monetized Site Explorer with advertisements.  In the corporate world, that is hard to explain.

Many Yahoo moves are hard to explain, especially to investors.  Averting a takeover attempt by the Microsoft giant in 2008, Yahoo has now given over many of its corporate assets to Microsoft in exchange for agreements.

 Today, Microsoft and Yahoo announced a signed confidentiality contract which allows Microsoft greater access to Yahoo’s corporate information.

 In a 2006 email from Yahoo senior vice president Brad Garlinghouse, leaked to the Wall Street Journal, Garlinghouse revealed: "We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company."  It seems that nixing Site Explorer fits right in with that lack of vision.

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