Most of the headlines about Yahoo! this year have been about the latest Microsoft merger rumors and boardroom drama, but Yahoo! has been making changes to the way it approaches search.
Although a distant second behind Google in usage, Yahoo! is still a part of the search engine marketing mix. According to comScore, as of June, Google led the market with over 61.5% of the US search traffic, followed by Yahoo! at 20.9%, and Microsoft at 9.2%.
What are they up to?
Jerry Yang blogged late last year about Yahoo!’s new direction:
- Become the starting point for consumers
- Increase attractiveness to advertisers
- Use open platforms to attract the best publishers and developers
Yahoo! has continued to make announcements in 2008 about specific tactics around these strategies:
- (February) Announced an open search approach, including enhanced search results templates
- (April) Creating a giant social network spanning their existing properties, and allowing developers to build social apps that can use Yahoo! APIs to know about the users’ profiles, connections, and if they are online. Widgets can be built to tie in throughout My Yahoo!, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Home Page, etc.
- (July) BOSS – Build Your Own Search Service – Allows developers to use an API to access all the search data that Yahoo! has indexed and present it their own way, including mashing it up with other information
Enhanced Options to the Way Search Results Display
For this article I will focus on open search and enhanced search results display, which has moved beyond the concept stage and into production. The most interesting part of the enhanced templates is that every company or Web publisher can submit its own .
The example that Yahoo! published in February was through a partnership with Yelp, a company that supplies local reviews and information. The traditional Yelp search result might have looked like this:
Yelp worked with Yahoo to provide additional information that would be relevant to a searcher and embed it in its search results:
This does not mean that this entry for Yelp would rank better, but it certainly would be more helpful and attract more clicks. Pretty cool.
So can any company design their own search results template?
Sort of… Yahoo! lets everyone access the open source framework to develop enhanced search results templates for their sites through the project they call SearchMonkey. Once you submit one of these search apps, it becomes available for anyone to add to their own search experience. However, they do not all get pushed out to all users (only a few do), and very few users know where to go to select these.
These apps can take two different forms:
- Enhanced Result Templates (see the Yelp example above)
- Infobars - expandable areas that appear below the results (see RSS example below – the bar labeled posts gets embedded below the results and can be expanded)
May of these apps are specific to a single Web site, so results from only that sites are enhanced. Some of the enhancements will work on many sites. For instance, the app shown above that picks up RSS feeds from sites and makes them available from the search results works on many sites.
Where’s the Data Coming From? Semantic What?
How does Yahoo! know that a specific restaurant got a 4 star review on Yelp? Yelp has to tell them.
The new Yahoo! enhancement infrastructure relies on content publishers providing additional data to Yahoo! A Web developer can help with the nuts and bolts details, but you can basically package data about a Web page up and feed it to Yahoo! in a very specific way, or embed markup on the Web pages that explains the elements on the page.
The approach of embedding markup on the page to explain what things are is sometimes referred to as a Semantic Web approach. The idea behind the Semantic Web is that you need to give computers a framework to understand what everything means. Even mighty search engines can’t always figure out the context and intent of content just by reading the sequence of the words on a page.
If you are feeling especially geeky and want to learn more about the Semantic Web concepts, including specific standards like Microformats and RDFa to embed this semantic data in pages, check out an article last week by Yahoo!’s Peter Mika, or check out this YouTube primer.
Can I leverage these Yahoo! changes to help my Web site?
For the average content publisher in the short run – developing a SearchMonkey enhanced result template site will probably not help significantly. It might lead to a richer experience and more clickthroughs for a handful of your most tech savvy visitors that knew how to add one of the Yahoo! SearchMonkey apps. If Yahoo! starts including more of these apps into its default search results, then the benefits will increase.
Will these strategies help Yahoo! catch up with Google?
Probably not, but it is fun to watch any way.
If you want to see the current SearchMonkey search apps that are available to see how other sites are using this technology today, check it out at Yahoo!’s Search Gallery.
