Yahoo in motion

It seems that thanks to Microsoft's take-over offer Yahoo finally realized that the times in which they could gain market-share by offering a mediocre web-search are over. A few activities that are now coming to light have to do with Yahoo's web-search.

The first major step was their adoption of Apache Hadoop as basis for their search, a step that was hardly noticed in the SEO-world. Yahoo now has an open-source-framework where Google has its MapReduce and the Google-file-system. Yahoo has more than 10.000 servers working for them and – rather unsurprisingly – they posses the worlds largest Hadoop installation on that basis.

A few days ago Yahoo showed a few examples of their “glue pages” – a kind of blended search with the distinctive feature that it does not only show their own results but also queries and integrates outside sources. An example can be seen with the keyword “Einstein” – where they even list Google's blog-search as well as YouTube results.

This morning the postmen dropped off some advertisement for Yahoo SearchMonkey and later in the day I also received an e-mail on this subject. Yahoo is using SearchMonkey to open up their SERPs display-mode. Developers are now able to code small applications which can, for example, make all Wikipedia hits look nicer and more informative than simple text-summary – as long as the user has this application enabled. Certain similarities to Facebook can be observed, although this is in another context and, in my view, very exciting.

What a shame that Yahoo has nearly no market-share in Germany...

Johannes Beus - on Thu (05/15/2008) at 22:07 PM

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