Yahoo Upgrades Search Engine

By Elise Ackerman - Mercury News

Posted: 05/19/2009

 

Yahoo announced improvements to its search engine today that it said brings it closer to one of the holiest grails of Internet search: Answers, not 10 blue links.

For years, search engines like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have tried to increase the relevancy of their search results, striving to make them more like direct responses and less like an encyclopedia's index. "People don't want a search, they want to find an apartment or find a place to go to dinner," said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo's search strategy. "We need to move from a Web of pages to a Web of objects."

 

Last week, Google unveiled several upgrades to its search results, including a feature that lets users sort the results by the date a document was published and by its type. Microsoft is also preparing to release a major overhaul of its search engine that is expected to be announced soon.

 

Google is the leading search engine, carrying out 64 percent of all Internet searches conducted in the United States in April, according to comScore, compared to 20 percent for Yahoo, 8 percent for Microsoft and 4 percent forAsk.com. Raghavan said that Yahoo will be seeking to stand apart from its rivals by emphasizing responses rather than links, for example nearby movie listings and restaurants, as well as videos, sports scores and airline updates.

Rather than just retrieving documents, Yahoo will be "divining user intent."

Greg Sterling, f Sterling Market Intelligence, said Yahoo is "conceptually reframing" search. "Conceptually this is right and very provocative," Sterling said. "But it's challenging to execute it." Users are unlikely to notice a big difference, at least right away. "We didn't see any new products here," Sterling said.

 

Raghavan said the new approach "should be invisible" because it has to do with data representation. Yahoo search scientists said they believe their open platform, which allows Web site owners to annotate their pages and lets developers build new search engines on top of Yahoo, give it an advantage over its rivals.

 

Marc Davis, Yahoo's chief scientist for mobile, said Yahoo would be incorporating technology it had developed for its oneSearch product for mobile phones. "We looked carefully at the mobile use cases and what people want to do with their phones." In the developing world, people are more likely to connect to the Internet through a mobile device, rather than a PC.

 

Davis said by looking at the Web as a collection of objects, such as buildings or images, that are represented by data, rather than by documents, helps the search engine do a better job of understanding what its users want. "We are focusing on where we see consumers going," Davis said. "They are using the mobile web and trying to get things done."

Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_12404040?source=email

 

 

 

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