2009 was a disappointing and potentially business changing year for Yahoo! in terms of Search. If not for the deal brokered with Microsoft, 2010 might have been the end of the once mighty search engine.

So with a new year upon them, and a glimmer of hope on the horizon, Yahoo! have come out with a range of enhancements to help reinstate their position in the market.

At the top of the enhancement list is improvements to the way advertisers can view and control their accounts.

A new network distribution feature will allow advertisers to run ads on Yahoo! search pages, Yahoo! partner’s sites, or both. Advertisers will also be able to run different bid strategies for each.

The Yahoo! team have also launched a new tool which makes it easier for new advertisers to migrate existing campaigns from competing platforms (such as Google Adwords) across to Yahoo!’s Search Marketing platform.

And if that’s not enough there’s also new tools for:

• Migrating web based paid search campaigns across to mobile paid search campaigns
• Adding relevant long tail keywords to campaigns
• Grouping thousands of keywords in ad groups by relevance automatically.

Beyond their search advertising enhancements, Yahoo! are also focused on making their core search engine more user friendly also. From the their blog:

More than 2.5 billion searches are conducted on Yahoo! monthly (comScore, November 2009), and we’re constantly tweaking our search results page to make it easier for users to find things. The more relevant our searches, the more targeted opportunities advertisers will find. Our new search results page makes it easier to sort and filter results, including shortcuts that shows up-to-the minute tweets and news links for breaking headlines.

Since not all Web information is text-based, we’ve also launched better ways to sort multimedia searches. Our video search refiner lets users explore their favorite TV shows, movies and musicians in an intuitive way. The image search refiner lets people explore celebrities and places of interest and easily find more contextual information about them.

While its great that Yahoo! are continuing to invest in improving the experience for its advertisers and its searchers, it’s hard to see them reclaiming the share of market they once had. With Google now owning 72% of the market, it’s going to take more than some minor tweaks and tools to revive Yahoo! search.

Related posts:

• Yahoo Redesign Finally Here, Makes Search More Prominent
• DIY Tip: Fighting Cart Abandonment
• Nielsen Shares Top Advertising Trends for 2010
• Yahoo! Closes Auctions as eBay Owns 94% of Market
• YouTube Launches a New Visual Marketing Tool