Yahoo’s summary ouster of CEO Carol Bartz this past Tuesday was quite a surprise in more ways than one.  From a big picture perspective though, the news should not really come as a surprise aside from the way in which it was delivered;  Ms. Bartz was reportedly notified of her termination via phone call from Chairman Roy Bostock.

It was not long ago we wrote of the Yahoo and Bing search alliance then presided over by the newly minted Bartz, (September 2009 to be exact).  Her “vision [was to position Yahoo at] the center of people’s lives online” as well as to better address Google’s increasing search marketshare.  Her goal at the time was to shift the company’s focus to their bread and butter, content and display advertising.  The company was losing traction and focus even back then, which coincidentally precipitated shareholders’ ugly dismissal of co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang.  Quantcast’s rough estimates show Yahoo traffic nose-diving in July 2010, but flapping and fluttering downward from as early as 2008.

Yahoo was once the big fish in the industry, but has struggled to find its identity the past several years.  Is it a technology company, a media property, a search engine, or what?  Corporate direction?  The answer to this question is always the responsibility of the CEO, and as such the failure to find it incurs the blame.  Both Jerry Yang and Carol Bartz are immensely intelligent and talented people, but both seemed unable to find the compass needed to direct Yahoo, and therefore, they failed.  Should they really take the blame though?

It certainly can be no consolation for shareholders to see existing CFO, Timothy Morse, assume the position of interim chief executive (not to take anything away from the man himself).  He will reportedly lead a team of 5 senior executives in the management of the company.  Yahoo is also considering a possible divestment of Asian holdings to right the ship.

comScore recently released its overview of February US search engine share of searches.  Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in February with 65.4 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 16.1 percent and Microsoft sites with 13.6 percent (up 0.5 percentage points). Ask Network accounted for 3.2 percent of explicit core searches.

ComScore recently released its monthly analysis of the U.S. search marketplace.

Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in January with 65.6 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 16.1 percent and Microsoft Sites with 13.1 percent (up 1.1 percentage points). Ask Network accounted for 3.4 percent of explicit core searches.

ComScore released its December installment of the US search engine market share report, with Google Sites leading the U.S. explicit core search market with 66.6 percent market share (up 0.4 percentage points), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 16.0 percent and Microsoft sites with 12.0 percent (up 0.2 percentage points). Ask Network accounted for 3.5 percent of explicit core searches.

Google and Microsoft sites noticed a slight bump over November in their share of US searches, while Yahoo seems to have absorbed these respective increases, by dipping .4% compared to last month.

ComScore recently released the latest US search engine statistics for the month of November.  “Google Sites led the U.S. explicit* core search market with 66.2 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 16.4 percent and Microsoft sites with 11.8 percent (up 0.3 percentage points). Ask Network accounted for 3.6 percent of explicit core searches.”

*Explicit searches refer to searches conducted by users who explicitly intend to interact with their search results, as opposed to contextually driven searches.

Experian^® Hitwise^® announced recently that Google accounted for 72.15% of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 2, 2010. Bing powered search received 23.64% of searches for the month with Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 13.54% and 10.10%, respectively. The remaining 65 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 4.22% of U.S. searches.

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Not to be outdone in the iPhone apps department, Yahoo! is getting onboard with a few additional apps of their own.  Yahoo!’s recently launched Sketch-A-Search and Yahoo! Search App take Google’s Mobile App to the next level.

The Sketch-A-Search allows users to quickly find restaurants (other categories to launch on an ongoing basis) simply by drawing a circle around the general area on a map.  This comes in handy when you have neither the zip code nor the name of the area where you’re searching.  Once an area of the map is identified, a list of restaurants appears on the screen; by clicking on a restaurant one can read reviews, see pictures, prices and can even narrow down by type of cuisine, ambience and/or rating.  It’s fun to play with too.

The Yahoo! Search App offers “a fast and beautiful experience that integrates voice search, embedded maps, and information from Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, and other sources that appears directly in the results.”

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Not looking to be outdone in the real-time search department, Yahoo! recently announced a partnership with Twitter to integrate real-time content into social experiences on Yahoo!.  Searchers can now view relevant tweets pertaining to the topics in which they are most interested.

Previously, Twitter results were available on Yahoo! via their Yahoo! News Shortcut and for other buzz worthy topics (Yahoo! continuously kept track of search queries, and when there was a spike in interest in a topic, their search algorithm selected relevant tweets to show on the search results page, either as a part of the News shortcut or in a Twitter section).  With this new partnership, Yahoo! has built a real-time index of Twitter feeds, allowing for access to the full public feed of user tweets.

Bryan Lamkin, Yahoo!’s Consumer Products Group SVP, notes that this is just a “part of Yahoo!’s Open Strategy (Y!OS) to make the Web more open and relevant” to its users, promising additional features of the real-time search integration to be launched “later this year”.