Internet giant Yahoo! is re-wiring its strategy for global search business with the aim of chasing down Google, and its Indian labs are pulling the strings for it. The Carol Bartz-led company believes search has to be verticalised for a greater impact in the future. According to Yahoo! officials, verticalisation of the search would involve throwing up a web of information linked to a particular person or subject for a more wholesome experience, and not just myriad blue-links one can click on.
The Yahoo! Centre of Excellence in Bangalore is focusing on redefining the concept of Web search. Currently, if one searches for Sachin Tendulkar on the Internet, one will come across links which may not be tailored for the information one is looking for. Yahoo! is trying to innovate by building a page dedicated to Sachin which utilises the firm?s resources like Yahoo! Cricket and Yahoo! News?which provide information about Sachin ranging from his latest You Tube videos and Flickr pictures to his latest tweets?and then present it to the user.
Thus, Sachin will become a subject with a dedicated page in the repository. This page will automatically refresh itself with the latest news and this information will be presented to the user when he keys in ?Sachin? as the search query. The new innovation is being referred to as the `Web of Object? philosophy. While Yahoo! ties up this end of it, Microsoft, its search business partner, will power the results with Web crawling and indexing.
Shouvick Mukherjee, vice-president and head, Yahoo! India Research & Development, says the Internet landscape is now at a tipping point. ?We are focusing on innovating verticalised search within specific categories like sports, movies and business. We are also incorporating visual search. Video and image search are already present. One can also search in vernacular languages, besides searching through sketching a map.?
In the near future, search engines may be incorporated in a whole range of devices from cars and phones to television sets. Voice search?searching by just calling out the name/word?is also being improvised upon. ?We plan to make the keyboard redundant in a web search. Gesture-based search is also in the labs now,? Mukherjee adds.
Google has, over the years, dominated the global search business. However, both Microsoft (with its Bing) and Yahoo! are now determined to provide a chase. While Yahoo! has 9.5 million search users in India, according to figures provided by ComScore (the third party validator for Internet usage), Google accounts for 34.2 million users. In the US, Yahoo! increased its share of search users from 16.7% to 17.1% in July while those accounted for by Google went down marginally from 66.2% to 65.8%. However, the lead that Google enjoys over its rivals is still so vast that one doesn?t expect an upset anytime soon.