Yahoo To Search Behind The Password

from the deep-web-fishing dept

While many are focused on how the various "portal" sites are starting to act more like broadcasters, it seems like that's unlikely to be where their real value lies in the future. The core of all of these offerings is usually search -- which is about finding exactly what the user wants, not handing them some broadcast item that millions of others are getting at the same time. There's no real value in that. However, what could be much more interesting is how the various search properties are digging deeper and deeper. We keep seeing that with efforts such as Google and Amazon's scanning of books or Google, Amazon and Microsoft's real-world mapping efforts. In the past, we noted that as these search engines get better at searching outside the basic internet the more powerful they become as the interface to everything, going beyond the simplistic concept like the operating system for the internet. The latest attempt to search the "deep web" or the "dark web" is that Yahoo will be searching behind the password wall for a number of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Forrester Research and the IEEE. Of course, to actually read any of the content, you'll need the appropriate subscription -- but it does make these offerings a bit more relevant in making them findable. However, they'll still be mainly outside of the interactive discussion that makes up the internet, because they won't be linkable for others to look at.