Making Search More Useful

from the slowly...-slowly dept

I've been ignoring the thousands upon thousands of stories about Yahoo dropping Google as their underlying search technology, because, let's face it, this was a surprise to absolutely no one. We all knew it was happening, it was just a question of when. But, to read some of the articles about it, you'd think that this came completely out of the blue, rather than over a period of about a year when Yahoo bought up all of Google's major competitors and publicly stated they would drop Google. However, the much more interesting element of "the switch" is that it becomes clear that Yahoo is trying to do something more with search, and go beyond what Google is offering. I have no real comments on the quality of Yahoo search, other than running a few tests which suggest it isn't up to Google-level quality yet, but it's intriguing that they're clearly trying to tie search more directly to their other properties. The first evidence of this is their decision to include RSS feeds in the results, along with the option of pulling that feed into your "My Yahoo!" page. I doubt most people will use this (or necessarily understand it), but it is a very interesting move. They're basically realizing that there's more to search than just returning a results page. I'm assuming they'll be going even further with this, and it should be interesting to see how Google responds.