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Yahoo To Rival Google By Streamlining Search Engine Results

Posted on: Wednesday, 20 May 2009, 10:40 CDT

In an effort to lure traffic away from market leader Google, Sunnyvale-based Yahoo is pruning Web links from its Internet search results to provide more immediate gratification for users, The Associated Press reported.

The company is currently engaged in a two-year effort to gain a better understanding of what users really want when they make certain requests.

The company is looking to better clarify search results since the same search queries can mean different things for different users.

A user that types in "Paris Hilton" into their Web browser may be searching for information on the infamous socialite, while another could be searching hotel reservations in France.

Yahoo told reporters it believes its search returns are superior to Google and other browsers because it can track the search patterns and interests derived from requests made on the same computer.

However, rivals Google and Microsoft have both begun to employ the same kind of surveillance to improve their own search results.

But Yahoo hopes to get ahead by packaging its search returns in a way that makes just about everything users want show up on the first page of results.

In order to perfect this, the company has been phasing out the blue links that have traditionally filled up search result pages and is now displaying more capsules of vital information that include images, video and even sound bites.

Prabhakar Ragahavan, who oversees Yahoo's search strategy, said the company is looking to move away from a “Web of pages to a Web of objects”.

Yahoo's millions of loyal users have already noticed some of the search engine’s upgrades, which began months ago.

Restaurant and bar searches already include the address, phone number and maps on the main search page. Meanwhile, requests about professional athletes return their current statistics and musical act searches often feature music videos and playable links to some of their popular songs.

Yahoo also believes it has developed more complete personal dossiers to present when people are looking up information about other people, thanks to cooperation with social networking site Facebook and a specialty search engine called Pipl.com.

The company is even looking into showing nothing but images of landmarks or other pertinent pictures to some requests made through its general search engine.

However, much of the technology for emphasizing more photos and video in response to general search requests is still in the testing phase, but it could become a staple of the search engine within the next few months.

Yahoo executives said it might eventually start showing more graphical ads next to its search results instead of text-based links.

Yahoo’s share of the U.S. market has fallen from more than 30 percent five years ago to about 20 percent in April, as it has struggled for years to catch up with market leader Google, which now holds 64 percent of the U.S. market.

Google is still maintaining a comfortable lead over Microsoft’s 8 percent market share, despite the software maker’s spending hundreds of millions of dollars to improve its own search engine.

Microsoft is soon expected to unveil the latest renovations to its search engine.

Google's revenue reached nearly $22 billion last year—about three times more than Yahoo—mostly due to its domination of the search market.

Yahoo has had three chief executives in less than two years in the effort to get out of its financial slump that began in 2006.

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On the Net:

• Yahoo
• Google

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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