The Latest & Greatest In Digital Marketing News:

Yahoo’s Search Share on the Decline

Yahoo’s recent increase in the U.S. desktop search share has started to falter, accourding to comScore’s monthly qSearch analysis. In December, Yahoo replaced Google as the default search engine on Mozilla Firefox. That month, the first in the five-year partnership, Yahoo saw its highest share – 11.8 percent – of the desktop search market since 2009. The number increased to 13 percent in January, before starting to decline. The qSearch analysis comes from 17 billion searches. In February, about 11 billion of those searches – or 64.5 percent – were Google. Microsoft’s share accounted for 19.8 percent, or 3.4 billion searches. Search Engine Watch

Google Cites Local Inventory Ad Successes After Wal-Mart Drops Out

Walmart’s decision to pull out of the program was apparently driven by the desire to protect its pricing information. That’s no small concern, particularly for a retailer whose value proposition is predicated on low prices. Walmart is also reportedly working on its own local inventory product. Why share store pricing data with Google when they can share it directly with consumers? Despite challenges, if retailers like Staples and Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores continue to see positive results with Local Inventory Ads, I suspect Walmart dropping out will be a postscript just as Amazon now is in the story of Google Shopping. Search Engine Land

How Big Is Google’s Mobile-Friendly Algorithm? Bigger Than Panda or Penguin

Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji from the Webmaster Trends team was quoted as saying at SMX Munich this morning that the upcoming mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that will launch on April 21st will have more of an impact on Google’s search results than the Google Panda update and the Google Penguin update did. Google did say when they announced the mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that this would have a “significant impact” on the mobile search results. This is key, it is only impacting the mobile results and even so, it will have more of an impact than Panda or Penguin. Search Engine Land

Twitter Experiments with Carousel Ads

Following Instagram’s recent foray into carousel ads, Twitter jumps on the bandwagon, promoting apps with a new unit. The platform is first rolling out the carousel ads for a small group of users, following a February keynote speech where chief executive (CEO) Dick Costolo said Twitter is considering upping its ad ratio. Currently, one out of every 25 to 30 tweets is promoted; that number could soon be one out of 20. While Twitter and Instagram are recent adopters of carousel ads, Google recently discontinued its use of them. Clickz