Google became Yahoo’s default search results provider on June 26th, 2000.  On February 18th, 2004, Yahoo ended the deal.  Now, the Sunnyvale-based company is celebrating the five-year anniversary of its decision to tackle search technology on its own. 

Tuoc Luong, Yahoo Search’s senior vice president of search engineering, and Larry Cornett, Yahoo Search’s vice president of consumer products, wrote a post on the Yahoo Search Blog discussing the past, present, and future.  Since those first two timeframes are pretty well documented (and already familiar to many people), let’s go ahead and skip to the last.

Some of the stuff Luong and Cornett chatted about was predictable – the pair want Yahoo’s engine to better understand and respond to query intent, for example.  They also mentioned improving SearchPad, and since that product’s still in testing, the desire comes as a no-brainer.

But Luong and Cornett talked about "[b]reaking the ten-blue-links paradigm by developing a richer, more adaptive search results page," which might mean they intend to match or go one better than Google’s universal search.  And they hinted at "[d]elivering a new and better advertising experience that improves relevance for our users and ROI for our advertisers," which would be welcome.

So it sounds like Yahoo’s got a bit of life left in it yet.  Five years from now, perhaps we’ll see another update despite whatever Google and Microsoft manage to do.