As part of their initiative to open-up their search platform, Yahoo! Search is opening its search platform to third party content providers and re-designing the way users will be presented with search results. So far the results were the standard title/description combination, but the new result format will soon include user generated data such as reviews and images, as well as other useful information such as map directions, contact information, price range of services and products (if available). They state that sites like Yelp and New York Times are examples of how additional data can be incorporated into search results. Any site that can offer additional information about a particular search result can take part in shaping it for the searcher. This way Yahoo! is hoping to deliver a richer and more useful search experience to the searcher, and higher quality traffic for websites appearing in search results.

Here’s a graphical comparison of what the changes will look like:

before

after

“We believe that combining a free, open platform with structured, semantic content from across the Web is a clear win for all parties involved — site owners, Yahoo! and most importantly, our users. And by the way, users will be in complete control of the experience and will be able to turn off anything related to open search if they so desire. Over the course of the next few months, we’ll be talking more about how this platform will work and what it will enable.”

I think there’s plenty more to be seen before any final conclusion can be made about the new Yahoo! search result concept. It looks promising, but for now, it’s safe to say this is another example of the future of search and why it’s more important than ever to get a site/business listed and reviewed on portals, directories and content sharing sites.

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Yahoo has rolled out great search enhancements recently. I especially like the Search Assist, or rather the way it was implemented. Search assist is nothing new, but Yahoo! has gone further with making it as unobtrusive as possible. It’s great for more general queries where the searcher wants information but is not exactly sure how to formulate the query. For example, if you are looking for information on programming, the search assist neatly breaks this general query down into more specific like java programming, c programming, linear programming, programming languages (which looks like it’s going to give an overview of programming, thus qualifies as best choice probably), tutorials (also a good tangent), and so on.

If your query is related to image content, then results are populated with thumbnail links towards actual images from image search and Flickr (although these are given pretty much only if you actually search for “photo(s)” through your search query).

These changes will improve Yahoo!’s position in the minds of people searching for information in various formats.

Update: Just found this photo on Flickr, from the internal Yahoo! Search launch party.

I love the Search Assist results for “martini”

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Yahoo! Small Business rolled out a new feature that will make it easier for customers to submit and authenticate their web sites to Yahoo! Site Explorer. Pretty much all you have to do is enable “sitemap.xml” and your site gets submitted to Y!SE automatically.

All new stores and existing stores that have “sitemap.xml” enabled will also have access to a toolkit within Site Explorer. After a few hours from enabling stores will have the ability to locate indexed pages and the links that point to them, and also to delete pages in the index or rewrite dynamic URLs.

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Ok, so Yahoo Search decided to try and make our lives a little easier by offering a way to tell Yahoo Search that dynamic parameters in the URL (the ?’s and &’s and this=that) can be ignored on request.

Today comes a new wave for search engines with the first-ever Beta launch of ‘Dynamic URL Rewriting’ in Site Explorer. The new feature provides the ability for site owners to alert Yahoo! of the dynamic parameters in URLs that they’d like Yahoo! to ignore, which we’ll then automatically rewrite accordingly.

Hm, nice. But it gets even more interesting. You can actually give the dynamic URL parameter you want Yahoo to crawl your page(s) with. For example, leave the parameter “?show=full” in the URLs to be crawled.

• Login to Site Explorer from Yahoo! Search.
• Add to My Sites and then authenticate any sites that you own or manage.
• For any sites that you have authenticated, you’ll see a ‘Dynamic URLs’ tab.
• On this tab you can enter parameters you want us to either remove from URLs or always crawl with a specific value.
• Once you enter the parameter, we’ll show you the # of URLs we estimate will be affected.
• After you confirm the action, we’ll modify our crawler such that every time we see a URL from your site with that parameter, we’ll automatically rewrite it within our system as per your instruction.

Next Yahoo shows us why this may be useful for webmasters:

• A more efficient crawl of your site, with fewer duplicate URLs being crawled.
• Better and deeper site coverage, as we’ll be able to use our crawler capacity to find and index more new content on your site.
• More unique content discovered, as we’ll handle more dynamic parameters in your URLs (if you remove the content-neutral dynamic parameters).
• Fewer chances of crawler traps, or web page sets that can cause an infinite number of requests or a poorly constructed crawler to crash.
• Cleaner and easier-to-read URLs displayed in the search results.
• Better site ranking due to reduced fragmentation of links and anchor text to your site’s pages.

See in more detail on Yahoo Search Blog.

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Yahoo has created abundance of mobile content. Just check out mobile.yahoo.com, and you’ll get the picture. The latest addition to Yahoo’s mobile portfolio is Actionality, a mobile game ad company. Basically, Actionality puts ads into mobile games and applications as they are being downloaded from the web to a mobile phone. Having recently announced its expansion of mobile ad services with the inclusion of Vodafone, Yahoo has made an even clearer move towards the mobile ad direction with the acquisition of Actionality. Whether the mobile advertising is yet profitable remains to be seen. Results have shown that so far mobile ad usage has increased but with very questionable results. The whole platform is still in its infancy so it may just be to early to judge on it yet.

Mobile advertising is certainly a platform that will experience growth, especially with significant improvements in the mobile phone industry. With the ever increasing demand for smart phones on the market, and growing advancements in that area (just look at the number of new smart phones that come out every couple of weeks and advancements in software platforms such as Symbian and Windows Mobile) mobile advertising will surely gain a lot of momentum.

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