Yahoo Redefines Search – Focuses on intent, not results!

With the growing competition and rivals, Yahoo (under their new CEO Carol Bartz) wants to pull up its socks and improvise. In their continued attempt to rather redefine its Internet search, Yahoo is focusing on intent, not results.

Yahoo’s Search Monkey Project has completed a year now, a technology to make search results more elaborate and more useful. Search Monkey allowed programmers to write applications that can turn dry textual listings in search results into an elaborate display.

Yahoo’s new vision revolves around more structured data.

Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy said:
“It’s time to kill the 10 blue links. We want to move away from document retrieval as center of search to divining the user’s intent.”

Yahoo’s projects are currently testing the ability to show up results that add in other types of data. For example:

• People who are expressing intent to visit a certain restaurant should be able to interpret from the Yahoo search’s most relevant content if that’s a good idea or not.
• A search for Beyonce brings up the popular singer’s home page, and also a list of albums and links to tracks hosted on Rhapsody, where searchers could play the track right from the search result.

Well, although none of these ideas seem to be quite novel, Yahoo still appears to be going uphill – slow but steady. Yahoo’s search rival Google seems to be moving in this direction as well. Only time will tell how effective Yahoo’s new strategies are and whether or not it can fetch Yahoo the No. 1 position by beating Google.

(Source: ZDNet)