Analysis: Yahoo! to pass search reins over to the user

Posted on 9 Feb 2006 at 17:55

Yahoo! is going to yield to Google in search. It's going to let Google crack on with perfecting the algorithm to return the results it rates most relevant to a query: a set of results picked from its index of some 60bn entries, if you take Google's claim of it being three times larger than its rivals.

In fact, it's going to step down from the helm of searching and pass on the reins of control. To you.

Yahoo!'s fresh-faced search gurus simply don't see the future of locating information online as being one of a search engine telling its users which item of information in its index is most relevant.

Bradley Horowitz, Director of Technology Development, Yahoo! Search told us that he sees the evolution being towards putting the user back in the driving seat.

When Yahoo! first emerged in the mid 90s creating the Yahoo! index was a matter of hand-cranking it, he said. But as the Internet took off, the next phase of search took hold. 'We needed bots to handle the scaling index'. Post millennium, and the third age of search was upon us, described by Horowitz as 'the topology of the Web'. It wasn't just about pages anymore; search engines started mapping out who was linking to who, where the traffic was flowing and so on.

'With 20bn web pages, we still have to maintain the freshness of what's delivered, using real-time indexing, page-ranking, algorithms,' said Horowitz. 'Webmasters decide the relevancy of web pages to your search. Well perhaps you'd prefer someone else to have that authority.'

'The search engines model historically is that they rank things,' said Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us which was recently bought by Yahoo!. 'But you can't have that centre point of view... I really doubt the predominant paradigms will work in the future.'

So, Horowitz says, the fourth period in search will bring us 'social search', in its embryonic form with Yahoo!'s MyWeb 2.0 and the del.icio.us community whose identity is formed through shared online bookmarks.

The basic idea behind del.icio.us is 'Keeping the things that you've found, found,' says Schachter. But once you go about sharing those bookmarks, suddenly you have an identity, a history, and things in common and unfamiliar to other online presences of this nature.

The next version of MyWeb too allows you to tag pages you find on the Internet according to their usefulness to you. 'You can key web pages and set them to share with either no-one, share with friends, or share with the world,' said Horowitz. 'It's based on the 6-degree connection theory.'

If you search for bikes, he said, you'll get a list of some 68 million results. But they're ranked according to the whims of the search engine you're using. But using the MyWeb model, pages rated by those within your social network will feature more prominently, so you benefit from the previous surfing of those you trust. 'It's expertise smarting,' said Horowitz. Plus you'll have all the presence and communication tools to then communicate with them and subsequently the bike shop.

'The holy grail of search is a search engine that knows what you mean, that understands your needs,' he said. Schachter agrees. He told us the question people really want answered is 'How do I find what's relevant to me?' And the answer he says is that 'You are the expert. You know that better than anyone else.'