If you hadn't heard all the fuss this caused, you might have felt it's effects in other ways. At the end of January, Yahoo's keyword selection tool - inventory.overture.com/ - stopped working.

This tool (and it's local variations) is used by millions of keyword researchers around the globe. Not to mention many keyword research companies, affiliates, researchers, writers and several major keyword mining software products.

Speculation was rife that Yahoo were finally retiring the old beast and that it just wouldn't be there any more. Well, the good news is that this rumour can be put to rest. Here's what Sarah, one of Yahoo's reps had to say on the matter:

"Hey there,

I wanted to confirm that YSM's public keyword research tool (formerly known as the Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool- KST) continues to exist today and will continue to exist until we replace it with an improved product. Unfortunately, the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear but it doesn’t mean that this tool has been removed.

We do have plans to offer a new public keyword research tool, which would be hosted through Yahoo! and available to our API partners. We plan on making this new tool available later this year.

If you are an advertiser, I'd suggest using the keyword research tool within our platform (the old or new one)."

It will be interesting to see what the new public version is like. I can't wait. And lets face it, this is one tool that is long due an update. Good on you, Yahoo!