Finally realizing they trail Google too too much in web search, Yahoo focusses on ‘web of objects’

After a poor show on the search engine market this April, far behind Google, Yahoo has come up with a new phenomenon to boost its search initiatives . It’s called the web of objects. In a search event in San Fransisco, Yahoo chained its search initiatives that it had rolled out in the past couple of years. Yahoo has a line of search initiatives that includes Search Assist, BOSS, Search Monkey, Search Pad and oneSearch. Although there has been no official disclosure, but Yahoo seems to be all set for revamp all these efforts.

The search engine giant is up with an idea to move beyond the 10 blue links (criticism by former Ask CEO Jim Lanzone). Yahoo is to adopt the web of objects concept. This is actually a better representation of the real world in search results. This can be simplified as an attempt to closely align users intent with search engine results and mapping those to real world tasks. Although the approach may be conceptually feasible, but it might not cover all of the search use case

As Head of Yahoo! Labs and Yahoo! Search Strategy, Prabhakar Raghavan explains this experience has been gathered from Yahoo’s experience with mobile search. The core idea is that people are trying to do things in places and that there’s a larger context to user intent and search behavior.  According to Raghavan, they are moving toward surfacing real-world objects rather than documents.

He further adds that Yahoo is least bothered of the index size going forward. Instead they would like to focus on building these composite bundles of structured data. Moreover, the web objects are manifested in the form of multimedia content and images (shortcuts). On a broader objective Yahoo would provide more context and answers to minimize links and clicking back and forth.

According to Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search, Larry Cornett, Yahoo was bucket testing various content presentations.

Have a look at the new conceptual approach presented by Larry Cornett, which most of the Yahoo’s existing technologies are supporting

1. Developing a web of objects visible in Shortcuts and non-textual content
2. Greater insight into the users intent like Search Assist
3. Open initiatives that tap the third parties and the crowd for structured data such as Search Monkey, BOSS
4. There are some Search Monkey milestones and stats that he added
5. Search Monkey results have witnessed a 15% improvement in CTRs
6. 15K developers are using it
7. Globally its spread over 23 markets
8. It offers partner branding through video, music, documents, flash games on the SERP

Undoubtedly, there’s potential in Yahoo’s concept of “web objects” and the relationship between search and the real world. Now It’s all Yahoo’s game to convert the revolutionary idea into reality for people.