CYBERSPACE – The latest changes to Yahoo’s popular search engine, designed to improve the quality of search results, has met with a mixed response from the webmaster community thus far.According to Tim Mayer, director of product management for Yahoo Search, the company is also working on adjustments to their search algorithm, which determines the ranking of search results. Mayer said that the update, which began on July 20th, is a work in progress that won’t be complete for up to two weeks, and urged webmasters to be patient.

“We need to ensure quality results for our users,” Mayer said in an interview with CNET News.com. “If we feel that this is a much better experience for our users, we feel it’s the right thing to do.”

Some webmasters are complaining that the result of the changes is the opposite of that desired, though – more illegitimate results and more ‘spam’. The user with the screen name “Perfume Merchant” posted a list of the top 10 SERPs for a search relevant to discount perfume which was entirely comprised of affiliate links, and “not one legit merchant in an obvious ‘shopping/commercial’ search term.”

“WiredGuy”, a search engine optimization expert who specializes in adult search terms, told YNOT in an ICQ interview that the jury was still out on the affect of the update on his own traffic. “My traffic hasn’t been much affected; it dropped but only by 15% or so,” WiredGuy said. “So it’s not a major update for me, but a lot of people were hit hard by it.”

Responses in a lengthy thread (19 pages so far, as of the writing of this article) on webmasterworld.com’s Yahoo Search forum were mixed as well. While many users we decrying the loss of indexed pages, other users hailed the update as much-needed dump of irrelevant sites.

“On the more competitive keywords, I’m seeing a lot fewer spam sites,” WiredGuy said, “but on less competitive ones they still are out there.”

This is the third major update for Yahoo so far this year.