By Michal Lev-Ram

LAS VEGAS — At a moment when Yahoo desperately needs to wow investors, the company unveiled a handful of enhancements to its mobile search service that are also being offered by rivals Google and Microsoft.

The announcement, made Wednesday at the CTIA wireless show in Las Vegas, includes a new voice-enabled search function that allows consumers to look up restaurants and websites by speaking into the phone. This could be a useful feature for people without QWERTY keypads on their phone, or for those who want to look up information while driving. The only problem is, Microsoft (MSFT) already offers a similar application on its Live Search mobile service.

Yahoo (YHOO) says its new voice recognition feature can adapt to a user’s voice over time and is now available for download on select Blackberry devices, including the Pearl and Curve. More compatible devices will be added in coming months.

Yahoo also unveiled a search box that will sit directly on a phone’s homepage, which will allow users to look up whatever they want without having to open their browser — a feature similar to a Google (GOOG) software “shortcut” for cell phones launched just last month.

On top of these features, Yahoo also plans to offer a downloadable application that tries to predict a user’s search as he or she starts typing. This is similar to the search assist function on Yahoo’s online homepage (accessible on a PC) but is the first such feature to become available on a mobile device. In other words, Microsoft and Google aren’t one step ahead on this one. Yahoo says its new recommendation tool can cut down on the amount of time it takes to conduct a search from a cell phone. Currently, this function is only available on Apple (AAPL) iPhones, which come loaded with Google applications like YouTube videos.

The new enhancements to Yahoo’s mobile search application will likely make it a smarter, faster and easier to use service. But, with the majority of the just-announced updates already available from the company’s rivals, it’s unlikely it will be enough to significantly differentiate Yahoo and deliver the much-needed pizazz investors are looking for as the company tries to fend off a takeover bid by Microsoft.

By Michal Lev-Ram

Starting off the new year with pink slips is never fun, but it looks like it will be a necessary move for Yahoo (YHOO). Reports that the “other” search engine will lay off hundreds from its workforce of about 14,000 surfaced earlier this week. Although company spokesperson Diana Wong would not specifically confirm or deny the rumors, she did say that “Yahoo has embarked on a multi-year transformation that includes making tough decisions about the business to help the company grow” and that the company “plans to invest in some areas, reduce emphasis in others, and eliminate some areas of the business that don’t support the Company’s priorities.”

As we all know, “tough decisions” and “reduce emphasis” are code words for layoffs, so expect some downsizing to occur at the Sunnyvale-based company, most likely later this month when it releases its fourth-quarter earnings.

At a party in Palo Alto Monday night, several Yahoo employees joked about who would volunteer to take severance packages. But the layoffs are a serious matter - in addition to sluggish revenue growth and a plunging stock price, Yahoo hasn’t delivered exciting new products in recent years. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, the company failed to generate a lot of buzz in spite of the fact that it had a much bigger public presence than rival Google - CEO Jerry Yang gave a keynote speech and the company had a giant white tent set up at the show for media briefings and partner meetings. Yang did unveil a cool (though far from revolutionary) futuristic mail service that will combine e-mail, text and instant messaging along with multiple social networking accounts, but he didn’t say when it would be available. He also announced that the company would open up its mobile platform to outside developers. While welcome, neither one of these are quick fixes to anything.

What’s more, while Yahoo leads in display advertising and its various sites get more monthly visitors than Google (according to ComScore), it lags in search and other services. It’s got plenty of lackluster products that need to be dropped or consolidated, including Yahoo 360 (a largely unpopular social network), auctions and music. The popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace certainly hasn’t helped the Web portal either.

So at least theoretically, concentrating on its search engine, e-mail service and growing its online ads and mobile deals could be good for the company. Last June, when Yang took over as CEO of the company, he said that his “immediate and overarching priorities are to realize Yahoo’s strategic vision by accelerating execution, further strengthening our leadership team and fostering an even stronger culture of winning.”

Layoffs rarely instill a culture of winning among employees, but at least it’s looking like Yang is finally on his way to refocusing Yahoo’s efforts on the things that matter.

By Yi-Wyn Yen

A year ago the masses had never heard of the iPhone (AAPL). This year, it was the most searched word on Google.

The iPhone ranked tops in both the U.S. and globally among the 10 most searched terms. “It became increasingly popular throughout the year, starting with the announcement in January and continuing on with the release in June,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s (GOOG) VP of Search Product and User Experience during a press conference Tuesday.

If Google’s Zeitgeist list is any indication of what trends matter to the public, then the presidential candidates should be worried. Along with the iPhone, the top 10 U.S. list included four social networking sites — Webkinz, Club Penguin, MySpace (NWS) and Facebook. The other five included entertainment searches — celebrity news outlet TMZ, Transformers, YouTube, Heroes, and Anna Nicole Smith.

“In search, there’s a lot of interest in celebrity culture, television and movies,” Mayer said. “New terms and new meaning of terms like the iPhone, Transformers and Heroes.”

By Lindsay Blakely 

StumbleUpon, the San Francisco startup acquired by eBay (EBAY) in May for $75 million, wants to personalize search - even if you prefer to use sites like Google and Yahoo.

As its name suggests, StumbleUpon helps you “stumble” around the Web and find new content. A downloadable toolbar suggests Web sites and videos and learns your preferences as you give a thumbs up or down to what you see.

On Tuesday the company unveiled SearchReviews, which brings personalized recommendations directly into search results on Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), MSN, AOL, Ask, Flickr, Wikipedia and YouTube. A registered user simply searches on one of the above sites. If any of the resulting websites have been reviewed by the StumbleUpon community, they will be denoted by a logo, star rating and link to user reviews.

So far StumbleUpon users have reviewed 13 million Web sites. Sixty-five percent of all search queries will include some recommended links and that number should grow as more people use the service.

The stumbling technology could eventually be a welcome innovation for the startup’s parent company. As eBay faces a dropoff in sales growth in its domestic online auction business, SearchReviews could potentially help people window shop on eBay and discover products they wouldn’t have found otherwise.

StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp says he can see SearchReviews enabling eBay users to “stumble across the marketplace” to find merchandise or sellers recommended by others. That kind of integration, he says, likely won’t take place for another six months to a year. “We want to let it grow on StumbleUpon first,” says Camp. He notes the the technology will need some tweaking so that it doesn’t, for instance, recommend merchandise in auctions that have expired.

For now the startup is launching SearchReviews without the collaboration of the search giants. Camp says that StumbleUpon can do this because it’s not reordering search results, which would interfere with the search engines’ revenue models.

StumbleUpon currently boasts more than 3.7 million registered “stumblers” that use the company’s website and downloadable toolbar. The company earns advertising revenue by targeting users and sending them directly to sponsored results that have been inserted into the mix of content.

Camp says the new SearchReviews feature was born of the realization that the company can’t compete with the major players like Google and Yahoo. “But StumbleUpon can improve what’s already there,” he says.