Yahoo hosted an event at their Sunnyvale, CA headquarters on February 10th, called SearchSpeak, to showcase some of its latest developments in the world of search. Very few new search projects were shown off, as most of the presentation was dedicated to highlighting search programs and applications that have been slowly added to Yahoo’s set of search services over the past year. The room lost power early in the presentation, foreshadowing the overall tone of the event, which was to remind the industry that search is still a priority for Yahoo and they are still very much a player– even though it appears that they are losing search power.
Despite new enhancements such as their redesign of Yahoo! Search in September, enhancements to Search Monkey, and the inclusion of Twitter in its search results, Yahoo is still struggling to keep and grow its search audience. January 2010 market share numbers for search engines released by both Hitwise and ComScore indicated independently that Yahoo continued to lose market share among the three major engines. Google still maintains its dominance among total searches while Bing, although representing a much smaller share, continues to grow steadily, eating away at Yahoo market share.
Yahoo’s most recent search enhancements are meant to satisfy searchers looking for “things” as opposed to “objects” or documents. This “web of things”, as they call it, more accurately defines what people are looking for; by offering results in this format, people are more likely to find exactly what they want. Yahoo asserts that simply offering a list of links, as with traditional search engine results page, does not provide enough information, especially when search queries are not semantically clear. Yahoo indicated that most of the search queries made via Yahoo contain a noun in the search string. This tells them that people are looking for actual information on specific concepts and “things” as opposed to information related to what they may be looking for.
Additionally, Yahoo now suffers from an identity crisis as it prepares to hand over much of its search functionality to Microsoft for a share in ad revenue. Most of its user base is made up of those who come to the site to check email or read news. Fewer and fewer users come to Yahoo directly to conduct a search. It’s almost as if search has become a secondary feature for Yahoo, and they needed the SearchSpeak meeting to reiterate their search presence to users searching the web.
Article by Paul McDevitt
