During the festival, Yahoo will showcase 11-12 short films on Yahoo Screen. In addition, it will be giving an Yahoo Audience Award, which will give the audience the opportunity to interact and have a voice. Furthermore, Yahoo’s omg! NOW program will include exclusive on-site coverage of the festival.

Phillips told us that the partnership was a further effort from Ross Levinsohn, the EVP of the Americas at Yahoo, to rebrand the Yahoo as a media company. He went on to say that “it was a dawn of a new time” and that it brings the company “completely together.”

Phillips also said that we should expect more partnerships from Yahoo going forward in 2012.

The extended partnership will not only further Yahoo’s reach, but it will also give local advertisers access to Yahoo’s targeted ad solution. Lem Lloyd, Yahoo’s VP of North America Channel Sales, told us that the companies hope the extended alliance will have the same success that their previous partnership has had.

Microsoft and Yahoo partnered in a search alliance 2 years ago in an effort to better compete with Google. However, neither company has shown a tremendous amount of improvement.

Ballard told us that he was pulling for Bing but that it needed to make some changes to better meet advertisers needs.

However, as Sage Lewis of SageRock Digital Marketing Agency explained to WebProNews, this “doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.” According to him, successful Internet companies take risks, innovate, and are passionate about what they do.

Yahoo, on the other hand, has undergone a search deal with Microsoft, numerous management changes, layoffs, and has also closed many properties in recent years. Lewis believes that this series of events, among others, led to Yahoo no longer being a “courageous, frontier-leading company.”

In other words, businesses should focus on their core product in order to send a message of authority and authenticity that reaches their niche markets. This method will better persuade consumers to make a purchase. For example, Amazon has hundreds of thousands of products but has expert employees over specific topics. When small businesses apply this model, their sales will likely increase.

Another area that businesses often struggle with is the shopping cart. As Boisvert explains, businesses need to have their contact information and, if possible, a live chat located beside their shopping cart. He said this gives reassurance to customers and reduces their fears.

Although businesses also worry about the number of steps in the shopping cart process, Boisvert believes this argument is overblown. He goes on to say that the number of steps should depend on the value of the product. For instance, a low-valued product could have a single-page process, while a higher-valued product would be better matched with a more detailed process.

In addition, Boisvert discussed the latest news with Yahoo’s small business division. The company recently announced a partnership with Unbound Commerce, which will allow all orders to be maintained in one place. Also, the company launched a customer registration system that leverages OpenID.

“It just gets harder and harder every year to maintain your edge if you’re out there doing big paid search programs,” he said.

To better manage these programs, he believes that marketers should integrate their paid efforts into other campaigns such as organic, display, affiliate, and social media. In other words, he recommends that marketers view all the programs as one and optimize them as a whole.

Yahoo, for instance, had a #1 ranking for an organic listing for a brand keyword. It then purchased a paid search ad on top of it, which drove more traffic to the organic listing. Marketing efforts are, essentially, more effective when they are blended together.

Incidentally, Roth also discusses the Yahoo/Microsoft transition. His job was to transfer all of Yahoo’s advertising over to adCenter and use it to manage Yahoo. In addition, he was responsible for monetizing search results all over Yahoo. He said that both companies continuously evaluated the transition in order to ensure that the highest level of quality was being maintained.

One of the biggest changes was the Yahoo-Microsoft search partnership. Although Yahoo still claims to be applying a slightly different algorithm to Bing‘s index, Clay believes that there will be a continual shift toward Bing. Google has steadily been a strong a leader in search, but the combined market share of Yahoo and Bing of approximately 30 percent is a powerful number that could cause some competition for the search giant.

When comparing the search engines to Web browsers, Clay said, “I think things shift, and I think that the leader is subject to change if they do things that the public doesn’t like.”

Another change that recently occurred was Ask’s decision to pull out of the search business. Clay pointed out that because Ask was not able to make an impact on the market, this decision would have a very minimal effect on the industry.

Although Ask is out, there is a new search engine on the scene called Blekko that wants to be part of the game. WebProNews recently spoke with its CEO and Co-founder Rich Skrenta who said that their goal was to the third search engine. While Clay believes Blekko is doing many things right, he doesn’t think that it will be the third search engine.

“You’d be a fool to ignore them. I just don’t know that a person that is a novice searcher is going to particularly know to go there,” he said.

He recommends waiting six months and seeing where it is at that point.

As new search engines emerge and join the battle, who will survive this search engine battle?

To learn more about Bruce Clay’s predictions, watch the full interview.

He says he will likely get one of the first views of how Yahoo Search Marketing will be integrated into Microsoft’s adCenter. As a result, he will be able to see any new features and if there are any bugs. At the time of the recording of this interview, Yahoo or Microsoft had not released any specific dates for the roll out of their integration. Aside from saying they hope to have Microsoft ‘s search technology powering Yahoo before the end of the holiday season, the companies have still not released any specific dates for a roll out.

Interestingly enough, last week Barry Schwartz reported on Search Engine Land that Yahoo is testing paid and organic Bing results on its own live search results.

Roth also tells WPN that Yahoo is continuing to push out its brand campaign internationally. He finds it amusing when people talk about global campaigns because he thinks the meaning of a global campaign is somewhat skewed.

“As an advertiser, there’s really no such thing as going global. Going global means local a dozen different times,” says Roth.

When entering a new market, he advises marketers and advertisers to understand that goals will be different, especially in markets outside the U.S. Fortunately, search marketing can support nearly any business goal.

Getting back to the Yahoo/Microsoft partnership, Roth says the pressure is on Yahoo to develop really compelling ad products since it will be pulling back on its development of the search index and search algorithms. He goes on to say that Yahoo has to utilize all the data that both search and display advertising generate and then leverage it to create new ad products. In the future, he believes their ad products will be more sophisticated and include better ad units, behavioral targeting, and more.

Risher starts out by saying, “Email is and remains [to be] the killer app for the Web.” As he explains, everyone uses email and need it since it is a prerequisite for many new services now offered on the Web, such as social networks.

Yahoo is trying to enhance the communication aspects of email in order to make it a definitive destination for users that promotes direct messaging. One of the recent ways the Sunnyvale-based company is doing this is through a Facebook Contacts Import feature. It allows users to pull all their Facebook friends/contacts into their email. Risher says the company has been working on social services for some time and that this is just the beginning of what’s to come.

As email continues to get so many social features, WPN asked Risher if email would eventually turn into a social network. Risher says a social network works well when users want to broadcast something out. Email, on the other hand, is more controlled, trusted, and direct. While Yahoo will continue to add social features to email when they are appropriate, Risher says it will not replace email with a social network.

In regards to spam, Yahoo’s mission is “for all users to receive all the mail that they want and none that they don’t.” Yahoo blocks over 1 trillion spam messages each year and in 2009, reduced spam that reaches people by 35 percent.

Recently, Yahoo Mail has added many new features that allow users to send money via PayPal from their inbox, schedule evites, and organize their messages into categories.  Risher says users could expect similar features in the future.

The advertisers that use Yahoo’s ad platform will soon be migrating to Microsoft’s adCenter. The full transfer is anticipated to take place over the next 24 months and will begin in the U.S.

According to David Pann, Yahoo’s Vice President of Search Advertising, the company hopes to have the U.S. migration completed in time for the holiday season this year. However, if meeting that timeline means sacrificing quality, Pann told WebProNews that Yahoo would simply move the timeline to ensure the highest quality transition.

After the deal is implemented, Microsoft will be in charge of the core advertising platform for both companies, which specifically includes matching, ranking, pricing algorithms, and more. Yahoo, on the other hand, will maintain its responsibility for the consumer experience.

Speaking about the benefits of the deal, Pann said it was a “win” for advertisers, consumers, and publishers.

“It’s really a win for advertisers with a single buy getting access to more inventory, it’s a win for consumers for a greater relevance, and it’s a win for consumers and publishers since they have greater access to a new set of participation and inventory.”

In spite of all the changes the deal will bring for advertising, Pann was quick to say that Yahoo is still innovating and would continue to do so.

Keep watching WebProNews for more on Yahoo’s current innovations as well as information on company’s mobile and real-time efforts.

Just for a recap, Microsoft will power Yahoo Search and Yahoo will become the exclusive search advertising provider for Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. Recently, WebProNews had the opportunity to sit down with Shashi Seth, the Senior Vice President of Yahoo Search Products, to learn more about how the alliance between the two companies would be integrated.

First of all, Seth points out that the full integration will take between 18-24 months. As it takes place, he is quick to say that users will continue to receive a compelling search experience from Yahoo that goes beyond the traditional search page.

In spite of the partnership, each engine will maintain its individual areas of focus. For Yahoo specifically, Seth says, “…What our users will continue to find is that not only can they find that great content that resides on [the] Yahoo network on Yahoo Search, but also that we can take people from Yahoo Search to the appropriate properties etc., in the right context…”

According to Seth, users will likely see slight modifications to Yahoo Search over the next several months as the Microsoft integration is completed. However, the companies have not yet decided if they will do a major launch with new features and functionalities.

There are still many questions regarding Yahoo such as the company’s level of commitment to search, implications on advertisers, future innovations, and more.  Keep watching WebProNews for more information on these very issues directly from Yahoo.

Larry Cornett, Vice President of Product Management and Design for Yahoo Search, said in an interview with Abby Johnson that Yahoo is attempting to create a “personally relevant search experience” for people. The company wants to provide a comprehensive amount of information so that individuals can always find what they’re looking for.

To this end, Yahoo’s introduced a universal header that helps determine users’ intent. It can help direct someone who’s searching for a football player to Yahoo Sports, for example.

Of course, this approach means that publishers should take more than text search results into account. According to Cornett, they need to pay attention to how their brand is portrayed in image and video search results, and on Twitter, too.

Cornett then boiled the matter down to a fairly simple question publishers should ask themselves: “Am I really being represented the way I want to be in every one of these search experiences?”

Roth said the purpose of the new campaign was to re-engage users with Yahoo. The campaign put a new face on Yahoo and gave it a new slogan: “It’s You!” The tagline’s intention is to put a focus on users and show that Yahoo has something for everyone.

Since Yahoo is trying to re-engage its users, Roth saw the need to incorporate paid search techniques. Although people talk constantly about true value lying in branding and awareness, any time a person pays for something, he wants to know what he gets in return. As a result, Roth and his team had to essentially apply revenue by creating metrics for measuring the engagement.

They did this by placing pixels all over the site for things such as pageviews, calls to action, and even hard conversion points like making Yahoo a homepage and downloading the toolbar. In addition, they conducted ad-hoc analysis to look at all the Yahoo data.

Although it has been a challenging process for Yahoo, Roth said it has been a good experience.

Miller talks about how the tentative Yahoo Microsoft deal will be bringing more competition to search as well as more innovation for advertisers, users, and publishers. The deal is still subject to approval, but Yahoo is hoping it will be approved early next year.

Miller reiterates that Yahoo is not giving up on search and intends to add value, control, and transparency. With regards to control, Yahoo has launched the ad delivery report, which allows advertisers to see how campaigns are performing on different parts of sites. Early next year, Miller says Yahoo will be launching “network distribution,” and advertisers will have the ability to separately bid on campaigns for Yahoo, the partner network, or both.

Miller also discusses a tool Yahoo currently has in beta, which is expected to roll out early next year as well. It is an offline tool that lets advertisers control their accounts without having to be connected to the Internet.

Yahoo has also been working on enhancements in ad selection to help advertisers maximize conversions. Miller talks a little about these too.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft’s Bing, and later Ask, all joined together to allow users to dictate which of the duplicate pages on their site they want the search engines to list. While users find the tag useful for internal purposes, users have been asking for an external solution for years, as Danny Sullivan explains. Users want to be able to control which page is listed across multiple domains as well.

It looks like users won’t have wait much longer according to a “premature announcement” from a Google representative. Google will reportedly support an external solution by the end of the year.

The second surprise announcement comes from Yahoo. During the “Ask the Search Engines” panel, a question was raised about the meta keywords tag. In the past, Google and Bing have not supported it, but Yahoo has. However, Yahoo announced that the search company had actually stopped supporting the tag several months ago. In other words, the meta keywords tool is dead for all SEO purposes.

These announcements were not only a surprise to users, but they were also a surprise to the other search engines. It will be interesting to see if the other engines do anything to respond.