Yahoo sure likes names that can be shouted. At a search event the company held yesterday, speakers focused on a “Web of objects” concept – also known as WOO – that Yahoo intends to embrace as a way of moving beyond the standard ten blue links.
The idea of killing the ten blue links should sound familiar; Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all talked about various types of universal search, and they’ve gone a fair way towards making it a reality, too. In fact, at least some of the reporters who attended Yahoo’s search event regarded it as little more than a cry for attention.
Yahoo didn’t actually launch a new product or name any release dates, after all, and the event fell between Google’s Searchology conference and the supposed debut of Kumo.
But at least we now have the term WOO. And Yahoo also took the opportunity to give updates on its SearchMonkey and BOSS technologies.
As a post on the Yahoo Search Blog explained, SearchMonkey is one year old. It’s live in 23 markets, provides 70 million enhanced results every day, and supposedly, “[s]ite owners have seen a more than 15% increase in the click-through rates of their SearchMonkey search results when tested against non-SearchMonkey results.”
In regards to BOSS, the post said, “[W]e’ve made key updates including allowing developers to monetize through third-party platforms and enabling access to SearchMonkey structured data. The BOSS API is on track to hit 1 billion monthly queries in May, without even including the volume from traditional Yahoo Search syndication. This is more than three times the queries served just six months ago, and ranks ahead of the combined searches on Ask and Facebook, and just behind Microsoft.”
Yahoo’s not necessarily in terrible shape, then. It just threw a big party for no particular reason.
