With its 9.6% market share in the Internet search, Yahoo! ranks second, but relatively far behind leader Google (81.38%). If the situation of the Sunnyvale company seems in bad shape, is also an opportunity to rekindle the innovation and technology, who knows, to his hopes on an overhaul of its engine.
So, yesterday at a press conference called “the end of the 10 blue links”, Prabhakar Raghavan, head of department strategies to Yahoo! Search, presented the future of the firm in California. “We need to migrate a web of links to a web of objects,” says the engineer before adding that when a user makes a request for Star Trek, he does not wish to receive 10 million documents, but information on the actors or the movie of his neighborhood. In this sense, Yahoo wants to bring research on PC version of its mobile, ie by returning more focused and results of different kinds.
For some time Yahoo! working on such an engine called Search Monkey, a programming interface available to developers allowing them to write components that the user may choose to activate in a dedicated gallery. The results will then be personalized with an emphasis of the modules of his choice of Wikipedia via LinkedIn or Digg Last.fm. With Search Monkey, the search engine Yahoo! becomes a “mashup” giant in which it is not only possible to view a location on Yahoo! Maps but also to listen directly to streaming songs from a music group, to obtain images from Flickr or to highlight the results of his favorite streams.
For their part, developers seem to play the game and since October 2008, the number of identifiable data by type (RDF) would increase by 413% in index Search Monkey. Every day, in 23 countries, 70 million results in optimized data structures are displayed on Search Monkey.
Last year, the company launched a project in India on Yahoo! Glue aiming to return to the same page all the results relevant for the user. Prabhakar Raghavan concludes: “If we can predict the intentions of users, this obviously enormous interest to advertisers.”
