During last week’s WebmasterWorld PubConference VI, Yahoo! representative Tim Mayer gave a highly informative speech and provided some useful facts and tidbits.
I think it was WebmasterWorld’s Brett Tabke who said we’re experiencing an exciting time in the search industry right now because the first serious search engine competition in three years is starting to emerge. This is a very significant time with Yahoo! charging strongly onto the field.
The Yahoo! Network.
Yahoo! currently powers half of all web searches and has 260 million users worldwide, with 100 million of these users registered. Yahoo! runs more than twelve algorithm tests per day to improve search quality and 99% of its index is free crawled. In the future, users can expect the Yahoo! toolbar to become more focused on search.
RSS is another new change in Yahoo! as webmasters can now use blogs and newsfeeds to get their sites listed in the search engine.
Today’s Yahoo! has come a long way from the Yahoo! of two years ago. Back then, Yahoo! was run by 15 people and received search results from third parties. Now, after purchasing Inktomi, Overture, AltaVista, and Fast, it is no longer reliant on backend customers. Finding strength in its world-class search team, technology platform, and search space market share, the company finds itself uniquely positioned to once again become a leader in search.
Why Now?
There has been speculation that Yahoo! dropped the search engine giant Google to move to proprietary search in an attempt to sabotage Google’s possibly impending IPO. Denying these allegations, Mayer insists Yahoo! is focused on user experience and not on “screwing with Google’s IPO.”
Before making the switch from Google, Yahoo! wanted to be certain its new search results could exceed the old Yahoo! search experience. Yahoo! wants to be a leading competitor in relevance, comprehensiveness, and freshness.
Each engine bought by Yahoo! has its own strengths and weaknesses in areas including culture, hardware, and operating systems.
Inktomi, which grew up through the carnage of the Dot-Com collapse, has a small quality index but is valuable due to its strong paid inclusion database, relevancy modeling, and editorial influence.
Fast had an influence on scalability and crawls every available document.
AltaVista, with its strong algorithm, excels in spam removal, machine learning, academic research, algorithmic duplication, and content classification. The company is also currently working on search research and development.
After teaming up with Yahoo! all these companies have grown stronger in the areas of user understanding and network integration.
What can we expect?
The new Yahoo! Search page is cleaner with no banner advertisements and the search engine now offers a stronger focus on keywords and context. Yahoo’s new algorithmic platform is easy to experiment with and is strongly related to “nailing longer queries.” Yahoo! strives to better understand user intent through personalized search and as its algorithm begins to more effectively reach this level of personalization, Mayer predicts search queries will eventually shorten. In the future, if someone performs a search on the word “newspaper” Yahoo! will be able to tell if the searcher is looking for The New York Times or the Washington Post. The company is already a step ahead of Google in the area of personalized search thanks to its membership base and its long history of user-focused research and understanding.
Garrett French is the editor of Murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
