The New York Times’ Miguel Helft offered the Bits Blog his live running commentary during Yahoo’s presentation of its new innovations. Entitled “The End of the 10 Blue Links,” Yahoo offered an update on the progress of their Search Monkey, a service that allows Web publishers to show up more prominently in search results.
Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy, explained that most users don’t want to search; they want to complete a task. And we know they want to do so as quickly as possible, with internet speed. That’s why Yahoo is getting away from offering just 10 blue links on the search results page and, instead, fulfilling the user’’s intent. Search Monkey does that by extracting “objects,” or things that people care about, like people, cities, restaurants, teams, etc. from the Web. Yahoo, he said, is relying on partners and Yahoo’s “open” philosophy to help gather rich data about the objects.
Yahoo has also been working to understand the content of pages through Search Monkey. It helps Yahoo to extract things like a restaurant’s location, ratings and other characteristics from a Web page about that restaurant, and present that to searchers.
Changes will be seen as the steps are rolled out over time, but Yahoo searches will increasingly deliver boxes of rich results. It will be able to do this, in part, because of its learning algorithms, but also in part because of the acceptance of Search Monkey, which allows publishers to flag certain kinds of information from their Web pages to Yahoo, making it easier for the search engine to process.
Though Google is the clear dominating force in searches with 64% of the market versus Yahoo’s 20%, even Google recently made some improvements.
Tags: Internet Speed