• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 14, 2008

Yahoo Search kicked off an integrated marketing campaign Tuesday to tell consumers they have a better way to search for answers. Eight weeks of online and radio ads will run, highlighting many of the recently launched technologies that company executives believe differentiate the search engine.

The technology aims to give consumers better search results for local businesses on sites like LinkedIn, Yelp, and Yahoo Local. The ads feature Yahoo's smart assistance technology, Search Assist; search security protection tool, SearchScan, which alerts searchers of sites that could infect machines with potentially dangerous downloads, spyware, and viruses; and search shortcuts that give consumers all the information they need for elections, gas prices, music, movies, sports, holiday recipes and more at the top of the search results page.

In a blog post, Yahoo Search VP of Marketing Raj Gossain notes the company has developed and launched hundreds of improvements to its search engine, including index expansions and updates, ranking models, and performance tuning. All the features are designed to improve search quality and deliver a more relevant search experience to our users.

The services do not seem to impress searchers looking for information on the Web. From July through September, 82.9% of spending in North America happened on Google--up slightly from 81.2% sequentially, according to interactive analytics company Covario, suggesting that Google gained some of Yahoo's lost market share during the third quarter.

Yahoo is struggling, according to Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry. "Instead of the new board helping Yahoo with strategic decisions they have created strategic confusion," he said. "The ads you're hearing are symbolic of how much market share and mind share they have lost in search."

Meanwhile, Yahoo and Google have begun to negotiate concessions with the Department of Justice to deface monopoly concerns. If the partnership passes DOJ scrutiny, it could have many caveats and addendums, reports The Wall Street Journal.