Wednesday 20th May, 05:47 AM JST
SAN FRANCISCO —
Yahoo Inc is pruning web links from
its Internet search results as it strives to provide more immediate
gratification and lure traffic away from the market leader, Google
Inc.
The Sunnyvale-based company previewed some of the upcoming
improvements Tuesday as it updated reporters and bloggers on its
two-year effort to gain a better understanding of what users really
want when they make certain requests.
It’s a challenging mission because the same search request can mean
different things for different people. For instance, one person
entering “Paris Hilton” may be looking for the latest dirt about
the rollicking socialite, while another may simply want to make
hotel reservations for an upcoming trip to France.
Yahoo thinks it is doing a better job, largely because it is able
to track the search patterns and interests derived from requests
made on the same computer.
The same kind of surveillance is helping to improve the results at
Yahoo’s primary competition in the lucrative search market, Google
and Microsoft Corp.
Yahoo is hoping it can differentiate itself from its rivals by
packaging its results so just about everything users want is on the
first page of listings.
As part of that process, Yahoo has been phasing out the blue links
that have traditionally filled up search result pages. In their
place, Yahoo is showing more capsules of vital information that
include images, video and even sound bites.
“We need to move away from a web of pages to a web of objects,”
said Prabhakar Ragahavan, who oversees Yahoo’s search
strategy.
Some of Yahoo’s upgrades were made months ago and are probably
already familiar to the search engine’s millions of loyal
users.
For instance, searches for restaurants already include the address,
phone number and maps on the main search page while requests about
baseball players return their current statistics. Searches of
singers often feature videos and snippets of their latest
songs.
With the help of the popular online hangout Facebook Inc and a
specialty search engine called Pipl.com, Yahoo also believes it has
developed more complete personal dossiers to present when people
are looking up information about other people.
In its next stage, Yahoo may start showing nothing but images of
landmarks or other pertinent pictures to some requests made through
its general search engine (Yahoo, Google and Microsoft already have
a special search section devoted to images).
The technology for emphasizing more photos and video in response to
general search requests is still being tested. It could become a
staple of the search engine within the next few months and when it
does, Yahoo also may start showing more graphical ads next to its
search results instead of text-based links, executives
said.
Yahoo has been trying to catch up to Google for years, with little
success. Its share of the U.S. market has fallen from more than 30%
five years ago to about 20% in April, according to comScore Inc.
Google now holds 64% of the U.S. market.
Microsoft also has been losing ground to Google, despite spending
hundreds of millions of dollars to improve its search engine. With
its U.S. market share at just 8%, Microsoft is expected to unveil
the latest renovations to its search engine in the next month or
two.
Google’s domination of the search market has established it as one
of the world’s most powerful companies, with revenue last year of
nearly $22 billion—about three times more than Yahoo.
Unable to snap out of a financial slump that began in 2006, Yahoo
has had three chief executives in less than two years. Its latest
leader, Carol Bartz, was hired in early January.