The official Yahoo! Search Blog reports a “relatively significant” update in progress – rolling out a new crawler, fresh index and ranking system changes – but unfortunately the post only discusses crawling improvements.

Yahoo! has accepted webmaster feedback that Yahoo! Slurp (their User Agent nickname), has been crawling too heavily – particularly during recent testing. Yahoo! comments that they’ve now improved their crawl process to reduce the impact on your server and will hit your site with fewer machine IP addresses.

The new crawler continues to improve comprehensiveness and freshness of coverage while also enhancing crawl efficiency, which reduces spurious load on websites.

On a more important note… if Pilgrim readers notice any impact on the index itself, please comment and share your observations. Thanks in advance.

The Inside AdWords crew have confirmed that an improved ‘top spot’ ad placement formula is now live, stressing that the change will offer advertisers “more control”. I think “a chance to compete” would have been a better phrase to use.

The revised formula will now consider an ad’s maximum CPC as opposed to the actual CPC. The announcement reveals that earlier top spot advertisers may have unwittingly by-passed recent enhancements to the Quality Score factors – quenching any conspiracy theories, it simply admits a flaw in the formula.

Since actual CPC is determined, in part, by the bidding behavior of the advertisers below you, your ad’s chance of being promoted to a top spot could have been constrained by a factor you couldn’t influence.

If rumors weren’t abundant enough, they sure will be in the coming weeks. According to the latest published figures by online competitive intelligence service, Hitwise, Microsoft have lost 3 percent year on year [directly to Google] in US Search Market Share.

Percentage of US Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers
Domain	Jul-07	Jun-07	Jul-06
www.google.com	64.35%	63.92%	60.23%
search.yahoo.com	22.13%	21.31%	22.54%
search.msn.com / live.com	8.79%	9.85%	11.77%
www.ask.com	3.21%	3.42%	3.29%

Surely the only way that Microsoft can hope to compete with Google is through major acquisition – making Yahoo! (who have held steady) an even tastier proposition. But let’s speculate for a moment on these giants combining search efforts; their joint market share would still be half that of Google’s – unless of course, they were to undertake a considerable rethink in the process.