Do you think Yahoo can make a comeback in search? Let us know in the comments.

The company’s “Search Alliance” with Microsoft leaves plenty of questions about the company’s future in search, as well, but there are rumors going around that the deal may not play out as planned. We spoke with Kevin Ryan, the CEO of Motivity Marketing, who says that based on rumors floating around in the industry, the search alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft might not make its projected 10-year tenure.

“There’s a lot of rumors in the business that [it] isn’t going well, and that it’s not going to make the full-decade run,” he tells us. “So, if I’m Yahoo, I’m spending a little bit of money trying to figure out how we can get that search bucket going.”

When the agreement was reached, Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan spoke with us about the impact of the deal on each company. “[A] big win for Microsoft, a lot of questions for Yahoo,” he summarized.

“Yahoo effectively threw in the towel with search,” says Ryan of the alliance.

Despite the many reports on the struggling search alliance, David Pann, the General Manager of Search Networks at Microsoft, spoke with us last year and pointed out that the companies had already experienced success, even in its early stages.

“It’s easy to say, ‘Okay, well, you didn’t do this, you didn’t that – it’s a failure,’” Pann explained. “I don’t think of that. I think that, given where we are, and given the complexity of the relationship… we’re actually making very good progress.”

However, if the rumors are true and Yahoo does pull out of its agreement with Microsoft, the company will have to begin thinking about search again. The only other option would be to sell its search business completely.

According to Ryan, there are several instances that could be credited as catalysts for Yahoo’s downward sprial, but he believes its Panama search ad platform played a large role in beginning the downfall. Panama was Yahoo’s attempt to monetize search, as Google did, but instead, Ryan says it was an “abject failure” for Yahoo.

Ryan compares Yahoo’s current situation to what happened with Ask. The former search engine pulled out of the search industry in 2010 and has now transformed itself into a questions and answers service with an emphasis on mobile.

There are some who would likely consider Yahoo to be a former search engine as well. Yahoo is currently in the process of reinventing itself as a media company, but the company’s short-term leaders have had difficulty in making this transition. Ryan, however, doesn’t believe this particular attempt is the best option for Yahoo.

“Stop trying to reverse engineer HuffPo,” said Ryan, “and create something new.”

But, Yahoo’s performance as a media company has been nothing to shake a stick at, and for many, Yahoo’s homepage works very well as a portal to the Web. Just take a look at Yahoo’s realtime homepage view counter at any given day. So far today (at 8:30AM Pacific), the page has already seen over 73 million views .

Still, Ryan tells us that Yahoo should reinvest in its core business, in which search plays a very big role. With a renewed focus in this area, he believes Yahoo could better serve consumers and also advertisers, which could help it get back on the right track.

Ryan told us there could be opportunities for Yahoo in terms of social development. Both Google and Bing have yet to completely succeed in social, which leaves an open door for Yahoo. He believes that a renewed focus on search combined with the opportunities in social could help to begin to turn Yahoo around. In addition, Ryan would like to see Yahoo make drastic changes internally in order to streamline its processes and improve its culture.

“I hope that the change that Yahoo makes will be very internal,” he said. “I hope that the culture internally will become much more positive, but we’ll see.”

At this point, Ross Levinsohn is Yahoo’s interim CEO. Although some people believe he will become the permanent CEO, Yahoo has not indicated any official word for who its next leader will be.

It’s inevitable that changes will happen at Yahoo in the coming months, but what they will be and whether or not they will be effective in saving the company are both still in question. On the positive side, Yahoo was able to finally reach an agreement with Alibaba Group. The $7 billion deal will require Yahoo to sell back half its stake in the Chinese company, but it brings resolution to one of its many problems.

Do you think search should play a significant role in Yahoo’s future as a company? Share your thoughts in the comments.

There are a few reasons for why this sounds plausible and one or two for why it doesn’t. The most obvious reason that lends any validity to this rumor is the fact that Facebook’s money has been burning a hole in its pocket lately. In a little over a month, Facebook has acquired or absorbed Lightbox, Karma, Bolt Peters, and, perhaps most notable, Instagram. The company just ballooned its coffers after the company’s initial public offering one week ago and, in spite of seemingly everyone except Facebook being very upset with the its shares’ performance so far, Facebook does have some more money to burn.

More, Facebook has been upfront about the fact that it’s losing revenue traction due to more users accessing the site via mobile app than through the actual webpage. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, heading into the company’s IPO, tried to assuage investors’ concerns about Facebook’s mobile problem by telling them that the mobile frontier is the company’s top priority. If Facebook were to pick up Opera, the acquisition would add a very established mobile browser to the company’s inventory of mobile tools. Also, assuming that time is of the essence in turning Facebook’s mobile platform into a source of revenue growth, purchasing a respected browser like Opera would curtail any time lost spent on building a Facebook browser from scratch.

Beyond adding a slick, respected browser into its quiver, an acquisition of Opera would give Facebook a really nice browser-based email client, too.

It’s been all but officially verified by Facebook that it is developing its own search engine, too. Analysts have already speculated that a Facebook search engine would take a huge bite out of Google’s dominance of internet search. Combine a Facebook search engine and a Facebook browser and a Facebook email client and, well, you’ve got yourself some pretty plump Facebook fruit to attract advertisers.

Plus, if Facebook really wants to take a legitimate run at toppling Google, this would be a pretty firm push in that direction.

However, Facebook’s passed on big-time purchases before. Microsoft reportedly tried to sell its search engine, Bing, to Facebook last year. Zuckerberg declined the offer, though, saying that Facebook had too much on its plate at the time.

Facebook’s plate has hardly gotten any less crowded since then; really, the company’s added a second and third helping onto the plate without even clearing off what was there in the first place. Between the IPO mess and the impending class action lawsuits happening as a result of it, an FTC probe into the company’s acquisition of Instagram, and trying to find a way to earn back investors’ trust, Facebook’s got its big, blue hands full.

In the end, it’s a matter of what Facebook wants to prioritize: cleaning up its act with its nascent yet lackluster existence as a publicly traded company, or trying to keep moving forward with its agenda as a technology company. Then again, the company could take the Double Dare challenge and go after both goals at once. Not impossible, but it could lead to some haphazard decisions.

For what it’s worth, Thomas Ford, Opera System’s senior communications manager, says Opera Systems is mum on the subject of a Facebook acquisition. He told WebProNews, “We do not respond to market rumors and we have no comment to the rumor addressed in the question.”

The polished up debut of Promoted Posts appears to build upon something Facebook tested out as far back as March 2010. Essentially, the purpose of paying to promote your update is to reach a larger audience. Upon clicking the “Promote” button, you’ll be presented with a menu of pricing options. The prices to promote a post are staggered based on how much of a reach you want for your post. If you’re aiming for the fences, for example, you can pay $20 to reach about a wide audience of Facebookers who have liked your Page. Alternately, if you want to aim more conservatively, you can select a less expensive value, such as $5, the cheapest (that I’ve seen), to only reach about a more concentrated selection your total fanbase.

WebProNews’ Facebook page hasn’t yet been granted the Promote function just yet, but the example below was captured by MarketingLand, who apparently have the feature now.

They’ve got a few other examples of what the new feature looks like on their post about it, if you’re so inclined to investigate the visual evidence further.

More, Facebook appears to be testing out different pricing structures. Another example spotted over at Business Insider lists the dollar increments as $15, $20, $30, $50, and $75. If I had to guess at this point, I’d say that the different pricing structures – notice BI’s gets a lot more expensive than MarketingLand’s – the different pricing scales are relative to the amount of Facebook fans your Page has. However, if that is the case, it almost seems like Facebook would then be penalizing Pages that have a ton of fans if it’s going to cost those administrators more money to promote a post than it would if they had, say, a fourth of the fans. Guess we’ll wait and see once this feature is fully available.

This Promoted Post feature doesn’t sound all too dissimilar to something Facebook was testing in New Zealand recently by giving the average Facebook user – not to be confused with the Page users that are for brands, companies, celebrities, etc. – an option to promote their posts. The pay option to promote your post to all of your friends ran about a $1.50 but there weren’t any reports that there were multiple pricing tiers.

Finally, there’ve been some reports throughout the day today that businesses have been having trouble posting updates to their Facebook Pages, so there could be a possible connection to Facebook’s decision to start rolling out the Promoted Posts option to pages and this temporary impairment of Page administrators’ ability to post links. As of writing this, we’re still not able to post links through our WPN page.

Anybody else out there getting their hands on the Promoted Post feature early? Let us know what you think, if you’d ever use it, why you’d use it, all that good stuff in the comments below.

In 2010, Ask exited the search business to focus its efforts on a Q/A service and mobile endeavors. Also in 2010, Blekko launched with the goal of becoming the “#3 search engine” by tackling the growing problem of spam with its slashtag technology approach.

Other than these events, the search player side of the industry has been relatively quiet. There is, however, current talk of Yahoo re-entering the search market and pulling out of its 10-year search deal with Microsoft. This week, the company introduced Yahoo Axis, which could be its first move in this direction.

Still, there is one more player that we have yet to mention – DuckDuckGo. This search engine launched quietly in 2008 and has stayed somewhat low on the radar until recently. It is getting a lot of attention now though for the bold position it is taking on major issues.

When we talked with the search engine’s founder Gabriel Weinberg last year, he told us that DuckDuckGo was focused on building a search alternative to Google. The search engine separates itself from other search engines through its Zero-Click Info feature that provides instant answers to search queries, its user experience that is free of both spam and clutter, and its privacy protections for users.

Over the past year, DuckDuckGo has ramped up its efforts in each of these areas, and as a result, users are noticing. In a recent conversation with Weinberg, he tells us that DuckDuckGo receives just under 50 million search queries a month, which translates into about 1.5 million each day. In other words, the search engine has more than doubled its traffic.

“We’ve grown gradually since the beginning, but we had a major uptick at the beginning of the year when we launched a visual redesign,” said Weinberg.

He explained that DuckDuckGo made around 100 changes that it rolled out in that redesign. More recently, the search engine announced an effort that encourages developers to add instant answer plugins to DuckDuckGo. The initiative is called DuckDuckHack and is geared toward making the search experience faster and more relevant.

Local, mobile, and social are also just as important to DuckDuckGo as they are to other search engines. Instead of viewing them as individual products, however, it uses an “umbrella approach” for them. In other words, all these areas are incorporated into finding the best search results.

“Instead of tailoring results to you personally,” says Weinberg, “we, instead, return results that are generally known to be good.”

Ultimately, DuckDuckGo is trying to improve in all the areas that Google seems to be lacking in. For instance, Google has had many struggles regarding content farms and spam in the past couple of years. Although it has attempted to address these issues with the ongoing Panda updates, some people, including Weinberg, believe the problems still exist.

“A lot of it seems opaque to me,” said Weinberg. “I’m sure there’s a ton of changes, but I still see a lot of the same kind of, what I consider, content farms on Google.”

The privacy issues against Google continue to build as well. The search giant has received scrutiny from both the U.S. and Europe, and after releasing its new privacy policy earlier this year, it has gotten even more criticism.

For DuckDuckGo, this turn of events creates an opportunity. As users become more dissatisfied with Google, Weinberg is hoping that they’ll look to his search engine as an alternative.

“We’re making the case that there are certainly some users who would prefer to be tracked a lot less,” he said. “I really think there is a percentage who prefer alternative experiences.”

The irony in all this is that DuckDuckGo makes money the same way that Google does – through advertising based on search queries. But, “you don’t have to track users to do that,” Weinberg says.

“The problem is that they want to serve better ads across their sites where you don’t have that search query to serve an ad against,” he further explained.

While it is possible that DuckDuckGo could begin to pull away some of Google’s search market share, Weinberg tell us that DuckDuckGo has no desire to become a big corporation. Web search is the company’s #1 priority at this point, and he intends to keep it that way.

“Our goal really is just to build a nice alternative search engine that… a decent percentage of people would prefer as their search engine of choice,” he said.

You could be forgiven for having let that day slip from your mind given how all of the news these days about Facebook’s struggling Nasdaq performance, but Facebook doesn’t want you to forget about those premium ads. Especially now of all times.

That may be why Facebook is attempting to jog the memory of advertisers by introducing a new tool to ease the purchase of premium ads. Facebook may soon add the capability to purchase premium ads through the use of the the site’s power editor, a tool that lets advertisers mass edit ads as well as monitor how those ads are faring out in the wild. The company is said to be collaborating with developers and advertisers in order to come up with more ways for businesses to buy ads – features that may be rolling out in a matter of weeks.

In addition to adding the ability to purchase ads within power editor, look out for a second ad-purchasing tool through Facebook’s API.

Regardless of whether the ads actually do anything for advertisers, Facebook is really trying to expedite the management of the premium ads lately. In March, the company launched a handy-dandy demo tool for premium ads so that businesses could get a clearer glimpse of what their ads were going to look like once they were officially deployed.

According to Agency Spy, promoted images of Scumbag Steve’s Brisk campaign will appear on Imgur, which will no doubt make use of the meme images that made Boston such a popular figure on the Internet. While there’s been no discussion of Steve’s financial reward for the ad campaign, it’s not a stretch to think it will be fairly lucrative.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Scumbag Steve meme, Know Your Meme is all over it, complete with examples of the images that led to his notoriety. Then there’s the videos Blake/Steve has created, demonstrating he, too, is having fun with his Internet fame:

Shouldn’t that be “stop it Pepsi?”

Victim? I think our definitions differ… While it appears as if the Scumbag Steve/Brisk Iced Tea ads will be image-based, I’m not going to let that stop me from featuring a couple of my favorite Brisk ads from years past:

The survey gauged the performance of 10,000 randomly selected ad campaigns on Facebook. As far as the promise of gratification goes that drives any campaign, my speculation is that a coupon is the most accessible and immediate reward. Giveaways and sweepstakes aren’t as guaranteed and, as you can see in the graph below, nobody wants to do any work extra work to engage your ad. So yeah, don’t make us write essays or compose visual media. Just give us discounts on burritos and new pants we’ll need after our waistlines bulge from gorging ourselves on too many burritos.

However, if you’re more interested in getting some semi-viral interaction among consumers, offering up quizzes for people to take is a great way to do that. According to the survey’s findings, 82% of Facebookers were likely to click on quizzes posted by their friends and actually went on to take the quiz. That’s a lotta earned impressions your ad campaign gets as a bonus. Plus, who doesn’t love a good quiz? You can find out what kind of latte you are or which Beatle you are or what your odds are of surviving an invasion of mutant zombies. It’s happy meal science and doesn’t actually reveal any insightful discoveries about your subconscious, but it’s fun to pass around and compare with your friends.

[Via AllFacebook.]

“The incredible promise of digital advertising has been somewhat hindered by the unwanted inefficiencies as a result of market fragmentation,” a representative for Microsoft tells WebProNews. “All advertisers and publishers want are simple solutions that will help make ad buys with the best ROI.”

As part of the partnership, the Microsoft Media Network will be granted programmatic access to Real Media Group’s premium inventory. That makes Microsoft the only source not run by WPP (parent company of 24/7 Media) with such access.

Automated media planning tool 24/7 Connect will include Microsoft’s full catalog of ad offerings. Microsoft’s Atlas will also become one of WPP’s preferred ad servers, and offer “expanded opportunities,” according to the announcement. Specifically, there will be integration between 24/7 Trader (24/7 Media’s demand side platform used by WPP) and Microsoft’s Atlas ad server.

“This is an exciting day for 24/7 Media, WPP and our clients globally,” said 24/7 Media CEO David J. Moore. “In partnering with Microsoft, one of our largest and most strategic clients, we are creating a very powerful suite of capabilities that rivals any other offering available today in digital marketing.”

“We’re very pleased to be able to strike this partnership with 24/7,” added Rik van der Kooi, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Advertising. “Our mission is to provide extraordinary experiences for consumers and effective solutions for our digital marketing partners. Marketers are telling us they need to get their hands on premium quality inventory at-scale by reducing friction, which is what this deal will do. And unlocking new demand for publishers’ inventory through our Exchange will similarly create new value in the market.”

The global online ad market is estimated to exceed $98 billion this year, according to GroupM, and this deal represents a partnership between two major powerhouses in that space. Between this and the its “search alliance” with Yahoo, Microsoft is putting together some pretty astounding advertising partnerships. Of course, there are rumors that the search alliance could break up before its full ten years are up.

For example, here, you see “Ads related to shoes”:

This was pointed out by Thomas Ballantyne at Dreams Systems Media on Friday, and confirmed by Search Engine Land as having rolled out (as opposed to being a test) today. Pamela Parker shares a quote from a Google spokesperson, saying, “As part of our ongoing efforts to show ads that are relevant and informative, we are including more information about why users are seeing certain search ads.”

Additionally, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable reports that Google has removed arrows to scroll through AdSense ads, which were introduced in 2008.

Last week, Google introduced some refinements to AdSense reporting, including the ability to view all-time reports, access reports from the My Ads tab and download CSVs in the correct local formatting.

Business Insider took a look at how Facebook’s advertising model is working beyond the borders of the United States and found some rather pathetic results. Facebook users produced nearly $10 per person in ad revenue last year in the U.S., but those numbers clip off precipitously when you start to look at different regions. In Europe, the revenue is just under $5 while Asia is a meager $1.79 and in the rest of the world users are churning up a lowly $1.42 per person.

The way each of those different regions trend, it’s a good thing there’s not more parts of the world or else those bar graphs would be inverted and Facebook would end up actually paying users to look at ads. Actually, I wouldn’t mind that at all, but I’m sure all those investors would mind considerably.

So what’s a Zuckerberg to do? Really get to work on a strategy that actually makes some money off of Facebook’s mobile platform? Focus more on making advertising tools more effective? They should probably start at something soon, as today’s activity on the stock market doesn’t really inspire much excitement from Facebook.