As I mentioned in my previous article on Google's sophisticated news service, Yahoo! guys are not very happy about the enhancements their web search provider made to its news portal. Now, it's time for them to strike back.

I was looking for a new high-speed internet service provider for the past two weeks and couldn't find any good ones in the heart of silicon valley, while I used to get a great service from AT&T before I move here from Berkeley. I read on the news last week that Yahoo! launched its high speed Internet access along with the local phone company, SBC, but I didn't think it's that serious. It was a couple of nights ago when I saw the advertisements all over the Yahoo! mail (even in the body of e-mails), and also on almost everywhere you go on their different web services. Watching TV that night, I saw their new Internet service commercials during the most popular TV shows breaks. Now, this is something serious and they're actively putting their money and effort into.

That is not all Yahoo! fellows are busy with these days. CNET reports: Yahoo turns on TV promotions. Yahoo on Tuesday said the UPN TV network is promoting two new shows ("The Twilight Zone" and "Haunted.") on its Web portal. This is UPN's first major advertising purchase on Yahoo. Advertising revenue on Yahoo has continually declined since the Internet bubble burst (19% less advertising revenue).

Is that all? No! They are now offering RSS feeds for their finance information! You thought Google would be the first one? Now, this is the first time a major portal has endorsed the RSS format for web services. Look at this:

http://rss.finance.yahoo.com/rss/get?ticker=YHOO

Pretty impressive, isn't it? They used to have a simple text page which we used for our research experience in my previous company when you passed a parameter to their stock pages (add d=t&o=t to http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=YHOO&d=t&o=t and see the effect). Then they launched the Comma Seperated Value format called through this method (you can specify the format) which we also used for the research purposes:

http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=YHOO&f=nst1l1c1c2

And now, XML! Pretty amazing, isn't it?

By the way, speaking of Google, Happy 4th birthday you guys! Best of luck!