Yahoo is Searching for a Wider Audience
By Azam on July 10, 2008
Yahoo is working on a new strategy to build a wider audience in their search business. Yahoo is opening up the search to developers to customize search engines on websites. Yahoo plans to sell ads in return from search results from customized search offering. The strategy is interesting way to take on Google search business. The open strategy will allow Yahoo to tap into a developer network to promote search technology based on Yahoo search technology.
Who is the BOSS?
Yahoo search technology is called BOSS : “build your own search service”. Yahoo has started the program with search engine partners Hakia and Me.dium. Hakia is a natural language based search engine; Me.dium ranks web pages based on real time browsing behavior on web users.
“Over the course of years, we want this to be much more than a blip,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of research and search strategy at Yahoo. Mr. Raghavan showed a pie chart in which a hypothetical collective market share of the new search engine had grown to be comparable to Yahoo’s own. He joked that the chart was a “pie in the sky” and would not discuss actual market share estimates or timelines.
Goolge dominates the search engine business and has market share of 61.8% which is about triple that of Yahoo. Yahoo is a distant number 2 with a 20.6% market share.
Building Your Own Search
BOSS gives creators of new search services deep access to Yahoo search technology including query handling, search ranking, indexing and Web crawling under any label they choose. Yahoo is giving deep access to developers get to create their own text-link search services and, Yahoo is also unlocking its image and news databases to let outsiders create their own permutations of Yahoo News, or Flickr, its photo-sharing site, and supply spell-checking services to partners. The offering is quite impressive offering for partners that would have to invest considerable amount of money to replicate search efforts. Yahoo estimates an investment of $300M would be required to start from scratch to build a search engines in terms of hardware, networks, data, coding and expertise.
Yahoo is still focusing on the future. It will be interesting to see if the strategy will gain market share for Yahoo. Yahoo envisions large number of custom search engines will developed in niche needs. Yahoo release a earlier effort SearchMonkey that would allow websites to customize results presented to visitors on the website. Yahoo predicts the rise of industry specific search firms such as medical, finance, and more specialized search such as visual search. The approach seems more interesting as Google is probably the best general search and is hard to match, and Google may not be able to solve all queries in a one size fits all algorithm. The new entrants in the search engine market are taking a niche approach with strategies natural language, visual search, etc. The advancement of search engine technology will likely require new technology applications for more specific search requirements.
Categories : TechTags : BOSS, Google, Hakia, Me.dium, Search Engine, SearchMonkey, yahoo, Yahoo Search