There is no web-bot that can always get you what you want just counting tags and looking at your area code. I think Yahoo and Google thinking localized searches and better tags is a good idea. But people should score these sites too. If I search HP or Dell and a driver name right now on Google, the corporate site comes up like 15th on the list seconded to all of the commercially run file storage sites like Drivers.com and spy ware sites that "scan my PC". I should be able to flag them and hurt their search ability, they could limit bad searches considerably more just by asking the users if the vendor actually got priority on his own products, they could give less priority to sites that distribute software people don't generally want, and let us flag as unreliable liars those sites make "fake" tags to raise scores.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
Yahoo search: Time to kill the 10 blue links
Summary
Yahoo's search strategy is now focusing on intent over results. For example, if you're looking for a restaurant, Yahoo wants to make sure reviews are included in the results.
Topics
Yahoo! is continuing its attempt to redefine internet search by focusing on intent, not results.
The company held a talk in San Francisco on Tuesday to discuss the state of Yahoo!'s search efforts, a renewed priority under new CEO Carol Bartz. There were a few tidbits of news - such as the one-year anniversary of Yahoo!'s SearchMonkey project - but the talk really served as a further reminder that Yahoo!'s future vision of search revolves around structured data.
Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Labs and Yahoo! Search Strategy, made many references to Yahoo!'s desire to see the web as objects, rather than documents. This is something it has been working on for quite some time with the SearchMonkey project, which aims to get web publishers to use descriptive tags on their pages in order to let Yahoo! Search understand exactly what is meant by the content on those pages.
"It's time to kill the 10 blue links," Raghavan said, referring to the top 10 search results listed when you enter most queries into a search engine. "We want to move away from document retrieval as center of search to divining the user's intent," Raghavan said.
To that end, Yahoo! showed off several search projects it's currently testing, such as the ability to surface results that add in other types of data, such as reviews, to searches for local restaurants. In that example, people are expressing intent - a desire to visit a certain restaurant - and Yahoo! Search should be able to interpret that intent and show the most relevant content to help them decide if that's a good idea.
It showed off related projects currently in use where a search for Beyonce brought up the popular singer's home page, but also a list of albums and links to tracks.
However, Google's Universal Search has been showing different types of rich content within the regular search results since 2007, for example. And while it's true that Yahoo! has beat the structured data drum far more heavily than its larger rival, Google's announcement last week that it's ready to start incorporating certain types of structured data such as Yelp reviews into search results means it's moving in this direction as well.
One interesting thing is that much of Yahoo!'s current work on improving search was inspired by its work on mobile search, which is limited by the constraints of screen size and input method but augmented by technologies such as GPS. Understanding a user's intent in this type of search is critical, because a mobile user has less room to see the data and less time for paging through endless numbers of search results.
This article was originally posted on CNET News.
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