Yahoo! and the future of search

YoelleMaarek says the search deal with Microsoft will allow Yahoo! to focus on front-end search innovations  Photo: Yahoo! 

Yahoo! and Microsoft’s multi-million pound search deal was given the green light last week by both the US and European regulators. The arrangement, which will see Microsoft’s search technology power Yahoo!’s search engine for the next decade, will probably go totally unnoticed by users of both services, as it is no more than back-end tweaking.
But what does the union really mean for the future of Yahoo!’s search offering, ambitions and the overall search market? To some, Yahoo!'s decision to "outsource" its search operation (in exchange for managing the search advertising business of both companies) is a sign that it has ducked out of the search war that's raging between Google and its competitors, including Microsoft's own Bing platform.
 indeed, even Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, said it was a "shame" that Yahoo! was apparently exiting the market, as it had some interesting ideas. “I think Yahoo! had a number of innovations there, and I wish they would continue to innovate in search,” he told delegates at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last year. However, according to Yoelle Maarek, senior director of Yahoo! Research, nothing could be further from the truth. The deal, she explains, should be seen as liberating Yahoo! to focus on front-end search innovations, rather than spending time and money on ensuring the back-end technology is working well. If anything, says Maarek, the Microsoft deal has freed the company up to start fighting the search war in the most important area – the bit the consumer can see. Yahoo!’s search teams are planning to launch several new initiatives in this area over the coming months, to try and steal share from search Goliath Google, and also, somewhat confusingly, from Bing, the search platform of Microsoft, its new partner.
It’s useful to contextualise Yahoo!’s current search performance. In January 2010, its search engine recorded eight million unique users in the UK, versus Bing’s seven million and Google’s whopping 31.8 million, according to Nielsen Online’s latest figures. It’s current share of the UK search market is joint with Bing at four per cent, while Google accounts for 86 per cent. However, the picture differs slightly in the US, with Yahoo! accounting for 14 per cent of the search market during January 2010, Bing (combined with its traffic from Windows Live and MSN) coming in with 11 per cent and Google out in front with a proportionately smaller 66 per cent.
Maarek, a former Google engineering director at its Haifa Engineering Center, which she founded in 2006, believes that Yahoo! has always been quicker and better than its rivals at innovating in search – but has never got the credit.
“When I worked at Google – my team launched ‘Google Suggest’ [a tool which offers users similar searches while they are typing]. But this was a year after Yahoo! launched essentially same tool, ‘Yahoo! Assist. It’s just no one took enough notice and we need to get better at publicising our products.”
Over the coming months, Maarek says Yahoo! is focusing on three core search areas. Firstly the company is investing in lots of research and “data crunching” to understand how its search engine can better anticipate a person’s "intent" when they enter a search term – for instance, how it can discern whether a person is looking for business news, the record label or the fruit if they enter the search term 'apple'.
Secondly there are new tools being built upon and promoted to make searching via Yahoo! easier and help the company “establish a dialogue” with its users, according to Maarek. ‘Search Pad’ is one of these initiatives. It is a note-taking application which automatically assists a user in saving the addresses of the websites they are visiting on a virtual pad. It helps users collect, edit, organise, save, print and email their notes for immediate or future use. However, unless a user is logged into a Yahoo! account, it will not save or send a user the URLs after the browser window is shut down.
Thirdly, Yahoo! is trying to build upon is ‘web of things’ concept – the idea that the web should be seen as an entity built up of ‘objects’ rather than documents. This should be reflected in the way search results are presented. For instance, if a user searched for Lady Gaga, then instead of receiving a list of blue links, the search results will be presented like a mini newspaper – with a variety of types of result including, images, ticket offers, videos (presented as videos and not just links) and news articles.
But despite these innovations, which cynics would predict will go largely unnoticed while Google reigns supreme, why does Yahoo! still bother trying to up its search game when the market share figures stay pretty consistently in the same order: Google top, everyone else bottom. Maarek smiles and says: “Yahoo! has always been about content and its verticals. Google has never been about content. We started life as a directory with search – that tried to intelligently curate the internet – which is what everyone else is attempting to do now. When you have content – you have to have an excellent search function to reap the full benefits.
“When people come to Yahoo!, which they might do through Google or Bing, they start with one given need – for example to read about France – which then changes into another need – such as booking a flight to France. We have to give them the tools to search for those needs as they change while they are with us – and it needs to be the best service possible. Our aim is not to compete with Google head-on just in search – we are an internet media company trying to provide a holistic service which caters for a users’ entire set of web needs.”
Yahoo! Mail and its portal figures are very healthy and compare well against Google and Microsoft – especially in the US. It has also just announced an interesting partnership with Twitter which will see tweets added to its search results – giving its users a more ‘real-time’ experience – as well becoming a Twitter client that enables people to send tweets while using Yahoo!’s products.
However, despite Maarek’s optimism that web users are not loyal and could change from using Google search to Yahoo!’s service if they found it to be better, many people don’t seem to want to change their search habits. The goalposts are moving all the time, too: Google is also innovating at a fierce pace, and is pretty good at publicising it.
The most compelling argument, however, that Yahoo! presents for its reason to keep fighting the search war is to ensure there is a rival to the major player. That forces everyone to keep on innovating, and that's good news for users. Yahoo! and Microsoft’s deal will take a good year to bed in, but if it does help facilitate better innovation and healthier competition in the search market, then it could be worth the wait.