Yahoo Inc. will keep innovating in search and try to outsmart both Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. even as the slumping Internet company prepares to lean on rival Microsoft’s search technology.

That message emerged Monday as Yahoo previewed a series of search engine upgrades that it plans to introduce before the end of the year, just a few months before Microsoft is supposed to take over responsibility for powering most of Yahoo’s search results.

With Microsoft handling the heavy lifting, Yahoo will focus more on designing special touches aimed at making its search results more useful than its rivals, said Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo’s senior vice president of labs and search strategy.

“We are not going to be a version of Bing,” Raghavan said, referring to the brand of Microsoft’s search engine. “We are going to have our own Yahoo search experience.”

Toward that end, Yahoo plans to devote the left column of its search results to other popular Web services like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and even Google’s YouTube. Click on any one of the icons there, and information from that service matching the search keywords will appear instead of the regular search results at the center of the page.

The feature will enable users to look at Facebook’s personal profiles, Twitter’s message updates, Yelp’s restaurant reviews and YouTube’s video clips without having to leave Yahoo.

By drilling deeper into destinations filled with personal information and images, Yahoo is betting its search engine will gain a reputation as the best place to research and discover things about people.

“Searching for people has been Google’s domain,” said Larry Cornett, Yahoo’s vice president of search products and design. “We are going to take that away from them.”

posted on on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
under news and Internet Info
RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply