Yahoo To Overhaul Search
According to an announcement by Yahoo, the search engine company will continue to work on search innovations, despite their recent agreement with Microsoft to allow it to power their search.
Their intention was announced earlier this week, as they released previews of their own search engine upgrades, to be implemented just months before Microsoft takes over the responsibility of powering Yahoo’s searches, according to their agreement.
Yahoo says though that, with the basic functionality being provided by Microsoft, they will be able to focus on the “special touches” that they hope will make their results more useful than their rivals.
Yahoo Search Experience
Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo’s senior vice president of labs and search strategy, said, “We are not going to be a version of Bing. We are going to have our own Yahoo search experience.”
With that aim in mind, Yahoo will apparently be devoting the left column of its results to popular web services, such as Facebook, Twitter, and even Google-owned YouTube. Click on the relevant icon, and Yahoo will search the service for the keywords you’re looking for, displaying results just like it does for regular searches.
These results will allow you to view profiles, updates and videos without ever leaving Yahoo. The company hopes that this will help them position themselves as the search engine to use when you’re looking for people.
Still An Innovator
Yahoo will be looking to achieve this with a smaller resource pool though, if the deal with Microsoft receives the go-ahead from anti-trust regulators. The partnership is supposed to reduce Yahoo’s search spending by some US$500 million.
Despite speculation from various sources that Yahoo will eventually phase out search, the company has asserted that they will continue to innovate in the field.