Yahoo: We’re Ready for a Search Fight

Yahoo wants you to know that it still takes search seriously. Every so often, they feel the need to remind everyone.

Today, Ethan Batraski, Director of User Intent & Experiences at Yahoo Search put up a blog post talking about how Yahoo is going to continue to fight in search, and how some of its product experiences are “so radically different, you’ll sit back in your seat thinking, ‘what the &$%# just happened?’”

He also provided three bullet points of “what search looks like” to Yahoo over the next 18 months:

From destination to companion: Access and convenience are two key components in the search game. In the next 18 months, Search will be a companion experience that gives you answers immediately and instantly without leaving the page you are on – effortlessly.

From fragmented to seamless: Consistency and simplicity are two key components in the search game. Users are increasingly searching on multiple devices. In the next 18 months, your devices and platforms will be seamlessly connected, allowing you to start an experience on one device and continue effortlessly onto another, with simple access to any information on any other devices. Search will be evolving into a beautiful and consistent multi-modal experience that simply integrates into your everyday life.

From more information to better information: Relevancy and depth are two key components in the search game. When you search for something — say, Adirondack chairs — do you really care that we returned 9,150,000 results? Probably not. In the next 18 months, Search will focus on a deep experience that gives you only what you want to know, taking into account your search history, click behavior, demographics, social graph, and browsing history to provide you with a 1:1 experience. It will tell you why it served you the results it did and allow you to pivot on a number of aspects to further tune the page. It will no longer be a search engine designed for the masses, it will be a search engine tailored just for you. Some call it a results page; I call it an intent satisfaction experience.

Can Yahoo win a substantial share of the search market back from Google? Tell us what you think.

There are 4 Comments. Add Yours.

wes
September 23, 2011 at 5:26 pm

Yes. If they can deliver on these promises. Google search is leaving much to be desired lately. If Yahoo can exploit the mentioned benefits (which are clearly targeted at Google’s weaknesses) they’ll win more of the search market. IMHO.
Web Search Engine
September 24, 2011 at 1:39 am

One of the major weaknesses of yahoo, and most other engines, is the amount of time it takes for your pages to get indexed. You can submit an XML sitemap to yahoo and it still take a very long time for it to index your complete site. Whereas google is very quick to index and serve up result. Can yahoo does what it promises? I doubt it and at this point in the game I don’t know if I really care.
- Steven
  September 25, 2011 at 6:32 pm
  
  Very good point, but you kind of got it wrong. I submitted my brand new site both to Google and Bing, then I used both Google webmaster tools, and Bing Webmaster tools to authenticate my site and to tell them both about my xml site map. On the same day I might add. In about a week Google indexed my brand new 1,300+ page website, while Bing has yet to show that it’s spider has even crawled 10% of it. I even registered the domain only a day or so before I set up the website on our web server, so it’s a brand new never before registered domain. I’m already getting traffic from Google’s index for certain searches, while none are showing up from Bing. However, I like the relevancy on Bing than on Google for any searches I do, not just for the sake of my own sites. So what Good is faster indexing if Bing to me seems to have more relevant results to my queries post Panda than Google does? I’ll also add that I thought Google had much better results pre panda than Bing did. But the speed at which Bing’s spider is operates at it is ridiculous, especially if there is a site map to follow. So you do have a point that it doesn’t seem like giving the Bing Spider a site map to use makes any difference to speed things up versus when I used to not use site maps at all or even Bing Webmaster tools at all.
Taylor
September 24, 2011 at 11:31 am

I have to agree with the original poster. Yahoo and Bing together have made it very inconvenient for webmasters to put their content online, and even more difficult to enhance it once its there. If Yahoo can make strides to bring in the people who create the web, then they will do a much better job at tailoring their results to the search consumer. If they can’t even get web designers to focus on optimization for their search engine, how can they expect to get people to stray from the familiar in enough of a mass to regain a position as a search champion?