We’re bringing Yahoo back out of retirement, after realizing that we let a few of our clients down by moving prematurely.

Hi, everyone.

Last week, my team and I made a surprise announcement that we’re retiring Yahoo from STAT.

After taking a few days to talk to clients, we’ve realized that we made a mistake by moving way too quickly on that decision. So, we’re bringing Yahoo back ASAP and postponing the retirement plans for the time being.

We owe it to all of you to be more collaborative and consultative on decisions like this, while still evolving our service with an eye on the future. In our enthusiasm to move forward, we let some of you down. We are sorry for that, and know we can do much better.

Why sunset Yahoo at all?

Well, we all know that Yahoo has diminishing significance for SEOs. Their heyday is long past, and there are only a few markets where they still have any importance for driving organic traffic.

As a part of our app performance monitoring, we collect metrics on how often various features are used within the app. Those metrics have been consistently showing very low interest in Yahoo data among our clients — reflecting a general lack of interest within the SEO community at large.

While Yahoo fades, other search engines have become more relevant than ever, especially in Asia. We’ve been watching an uptick in people asking us to track Baidu, Yandex, and Naver. The future of STAT includes more flexibility for clients to choose which data is most relevant to their business; focusing our efforts on more relevant search engines is a big part of that.

So, we’ve been putting together plans to sunset Yahoo and release other search engines in STAT for quite some time now.

Why did you move so quickly? Why delay the plans now?

As detailed in our original post, in early October we saw an unexpected change to how Yahoo responds to our crawl technology. Suddenly, it became much more resource-intensive for us to gather SERPs from Yahoo.

Our data services team loves a good challenge, honed by years of gathering Google data. In comparison to the effort Google requires, gathering Yahoo data has historically been simple. But when that changed, the resources needed to collect Yahoo data suddenly outweighed the low value to our clients.

We knew we could solve the challenge with Yahoo, but it would take time and resources away from more valuable features that our clients are actively requesting. And so we decided to accelerate our plans to sunset Yahoo.

After the announcement, a few people reached out to us, and we soon realized that a small proportion of our clients are in fact still using the Yahoo data in some capacity. We talked it through, and decided that we hadn’t in this case met our own standards of service and collaboration.

Very simply, we moved prematurely, without talking to enough clients personally about how it would affect their teams. Ultimately, it was the right decision for the future of our service, but the wrong timeline and the wrong approach for our clients.

Are you still planning on sunsetting Yahoo?

Yes, we are. But it won’t happen right away, and we’ll only do it in close consultation with our clients.

You can expect us to reach out with a broad survey in the near future. At the same time, we’ll be digging deeper with those clients who have already been in touch with us about Yahoo.

Based on all of this, we’ll establish a proper plan for retiring Yahoo. You can be sure that we’ll be reaching out to everyone well in advance of that happening.

What’s happening with Yahoo data right now?

Our data services team is already working on getting our Yahoo crawl back and running as normal.

They’re coupling this work with the improvements they’re making to our Bing crawl. So, for the next week or so, you may notice some odd Yahoo and Bing data as the team makes these updates.

We will be posting a notice here and in the Home tab in STAT when Bing and Yahoo are back to 100 percent.

If your team has been affected by this month’s interruption to your data, please reach out to me personally at rob@getstat.com. I’d really love to hear from you — I think it’s super important for understanding how to do things better in the future.

All the best,
Rob Bucci
Founder & CEO