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Yahoo wants to kill the ten blue links. The company thinks its customers don’t care about the how many pages a search engine indexes — nor do they want to search. They want answers.
At least, that’s what Prabhakar Raghavan, who heads Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy told a group of reporters Tuesday at a briefing about Yahoo’s future in search.
The idea, according to Raghavan, is to take the insights the company figured out from mobile devices — which is about answers, not document retrieval — and take that to web search.
Yahoo says it also wants to pull out information from webpages, so that its index knows when a page is about a thing — a museum, a person, a restaurant. That let’s the engine know what kind of food a place serves, what its hours are, and how to return an answer that isn’t just a link.
Yahoo wants to figure some of this with its own algorithms, but hopes the rest of it will be done by big publishers, such as Facebook, that adopt micro-formats to tell search engines about its data. For instance, Facebook creates specialized public profile pages that use specially-formatted html to tell spiders what a person’s first and last name are.
That’s a fine vision — one that search engine engineers have been dreaming of for years — but it’s not simple to move from a mess of HTML pages to a organized library of the internet.
Yahoo also wants to make it clear that they are consumer-friendly and focused on making things easy. Larry Cornett, Yahoo’s VP for consumer product, demoed the company’s search suggestions, which is part of their normal and mobile web search. They’ve extended the function to their search API.
The company is also taking steps to figure out the “aboutness” of a query.
For instance, Yahoo is testing a search where a user can search images for “Paris” and get suggestions to see related images, such as Notre Dame or Eiffel Tower.
There was no “wow” moment in Yahoo’s demo so far, though the results all looked universally polished and useful. For instance, local restaurant searches are quite handy — floating up reviews, hours of operation, phone numbers and photos.
Saying 10 blue links is dead is a stretch for what Yahoo demoed, but the idea seems right, especially if Yahoo wants to differentiate itself from Google.
Marc Davis, Yahoo’s chief scientist for Yahoo mobile, said figuring out search on the mobile phone is about “shortening the difference between what I want and what is out there in the world,” Davis said.
For instance, Davis says with Yahoo’s mobile app he can run a single search “Star Trek” and with a single click, he can buy tickets for an upcoming show at a local theater on his phone.
All of this points to Yahoo trying to say that search won’t be solved via the PageRank algorithm.
Yahoo thinks that understanding the web, rather than indexing it deeper and faster is its future of search.
“If we can divine a user’s intent, it takes us away from being hamstrung by keywords,” Raghavan said.
So when will Yahoo users start to see better results? That depends. Better music searches are already live, while other innovations are being tried out in small batches.
In short, Yahoo is saying it’s still relevant in search and that it’s more useful than Google — at least for those who are more interested in using search to get somewhere or make a reservation or find a friend — than they are in discovering obscure research papers.
It’s a compelling message, but its not clear how it will move the search share needle so that Google falls below 60 percent or Yahoo gets above 25 percent.
See Also:
- Yahoo Debuts Search Pad, a Passive Bookmarking Tool for Web
- Wired 15.02: How Yahoo Blew It
- Google Search Deal Slips Through Yahoo’s Fingers — Is AOL Next
- Yahoo launches search tool like one Google killed
- Google Gains U.S. Search Market Share in April 2009: Comscore
- Surprise! Google Dominates Mobile Search
Source: Ryan Singel
