Yahoo promises it will still innovate search
In a conference call yesterday live-blogged by Search Engine Land, representatives from Yahoo gave a live demonstration to reporters and analysts of new features of their principal Web applications that they believe will attract new users. Included on their list were ways that Yahoo plans to improve search.
This after Yahoo signed away its search infrastructure to Microsoft in an historic deal late last month, which many perceive as Yahoo opening its floodgates to Bing. In an effort to minimize the appearance of the deal having any impact on Yahoo's search strategy, the company's senior vice president for search, Prabhakar Raghaven, told reporters Yahoo can still innovate with regard to the experience users receive from search. Maintaining the search engine itself, however, was a battle Yahoo could no longer afford to fight.
"The back-end of search is a megawatt war, and that is what we are getting out of," Raghaven is quoted by AFP as saying. "We believe the battle has move beyond the back end; we want to fight the battle on the other end."
The end that Yahoo is dealing with this week is the one that delivers users the feeling of success. Yesterday, the company demonstrated additions that it's rolling out to its search pages in the coming days, which will include an enhanced left column alongside its search results. There, users can narrow down results to specific sites, including how-to site eHow, online retailer Amazon, and Wikipedia.
Another innovation being tested can perhaps be called "inclusive context," for lack of a better phrase being offered by Yahoo itself. Here, the context of successive searches can follow one of the same contexts implied by previous ones, if there are matching contexts. The user does not, in this case, have to put all his search terms into the same search each time. Thus, for example, a search for NFL followed by a successive search for Bears will give higher precedence to the Chicago football team than to the genus ursidae.
Users will be able to drill down through successive contexts by way of a "Related Concepts" bar that appears below the new related sites list. Thus, a search that starts with bears could pull up concept links to the species and the team. Bing has rolled out a similar feature, and has already received some praise for it.
Regular observers of Yahoo such as Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan believe that Yahoo's search experience engineers were already at work on these features prior to the company making its deal with Microsoft. If that's true, it suggests that search engine innovation and search experience innovation truly were running on two separate wavelengths, which would lend credence to complaints from former Yahoo staffers -- and even its new CEO, Carol Bartz -- that the company had been too heavily "silo-ed," dividing its interests for the sake of division rather than efficiency.
Despite the ongoing substitution of its own search engine with Bing's, Yahoo's Developer Network continues with its plans to build tools that enable other developers to create applications that utilize search results. One is YQL, an API that borrows the SELECT/UPDATE syntax of SQL to let developers build structured tables from search results, and modify those tables based on successive contexts. In a blog post today, Yahoo engineer Chris Heilmann described YQL as "a terribly easy way to take any content you find on the web and turn it into something you can easily re-style."