Or so it seems.
Yahoo is all set to introduce a new technology, in the coming year, which will enhance the way in which search results are presented. Rajeev Rastogi, Vice President of Yahoo Labs Bangalore said, “When you type in a search today, you get a list of URLs (uniform resource locators), and they are not very informative.” (Source: PC World: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/20081204/tc_pcworld/yahootechnologywillofferabstractsofsearchresults)
The new technology is being designed to present abstract information alongside URLs. The relevant bits of information will automatically be extracted and presented with each URL returned for the searched query. According to Rajeev Rastogi “This will be much more informative for a user, and will offer him a much richer web experience.” Yahoo Labs, Bangalore is currently busy building this technology which would require revisiting billions of web pages to extract relevant excerpts.
‘Abstract Search’ is in line with Yahoo’s SearchMonkey experiment, a platform that allowed developers and site owners to use structured data to make search results more useful and visually appealing, and drive more relevant traffic to their sites.
Yahoo, it appears, is taking this experiment to the next level. Instead of depending on webmasters to do it, Yahoo has decided to take the other way round. Why – because not everyone is doing it. “Clearly we don’t expect that everybody will adopt SearchMonkey, so this ‘rich results’ piece is our in-house effort to automate the information extraction for large classes of web sites,” Rastogi said.
The information is more likely to center around crucial bits that would help searchers in identifying URLs that are more likely to meet his/her requirement. The abstract information in case of a product page is therefore likely to include the product image, manufacture and price.
‘Abstract Search’ is also slated to go beyond ‘Search Assist’ (a feature that auto completes the search queries) or Google Suggest. It will boast a new refinement technology that will suggest new categories of web pages to search users. Do we smell intent based search, “Yes we do.” The refinement will be guided by recognition of the user’s intent from his previous searches, his visits to other Yahoo web sites, and other information, Rastogi added. “Other information,” sounds intriguing and dubious. It will definitely raise many eyebrows on issues like privacy and tracking cookies.
Yahoo, it seems, has made up its mind to take Google head-on. If everything goes as planned, the final result could be unsettling for Google. It may not cause too much ruckus amongst the Internet Marketing fraternity because it has not been implied that this technology would in anyway affect search algorithm. However, don’t just take my word on it. I am not an oracle and I don’t know ‘how long the rabbit hole is’; what I know for sure is that this is going to be a ‘killer’ technology.
very interesting…