Yahoo Matures Search Media On Its Tenth Anniversary
On the date of its 10th Anniversary, Yahoo’s Multimedia Search Guru Bradley Horowitz discussed the various forms of micro media which Yahoo feels is its core competency, all connected by Yahoo Search. Unlike Google which is soley associating itself with search, Yahoo views itself as being more of a media company which uses search as a way to integrate the user experience among multiple channels.
With personalization and a uniform membership approach to various miniature communities such as Groups, Email and Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo has defined itself as a pinnacle of customer / user acquisition. While a user may change their search preferences from week to week from one search engine to the next, Yahoo feels that when offering a user friendly community, shopping, and entertainment experience, Yahoo becomes a part of that person’s life and not a web tool.
Yahoo views its portalesque network as its Yahoo Digital Media Dartboard, which encompasses a vast selection of search powered media outlets. Yahoo search therefore, could be seen as the bullseye or anchor – the mother ship of the total offering. “We see search as the new paradigm in connecting users with content in this micro media model.”
Yahoo’s Media Mosaic is centered around the following pieces:
Publishing – RSS Integration in the Web’s most popular Start Page, Blogs have long been awaited on Yahoo and Jerry Yang clued yesterday that they are on the way
TV – Tivo Search, Apprentice, Entertainment Tonight
Music – Podcasting, Music Match, Yahoo Music
Video – JibJab and Video Search may be the bud of a new web video community
Photo Sharing – Future of photo sharing in Yahoo Messenger
Yahoo has then introduced new user friendly tools which not only showcase its search technology, but bring a more holistic approach to web search.
My Yahoo Search is a new personalized search tool available for testing at Yahoo Next. With My Yahoo Search, users can search the public web or search their own defined web, which allows the user to search the part of the web that they care about and share that content with other Yahoo members. Yahoo Next is Yahoo’s “beta test” community where Yahoo can showcase its newest tools and allow for user feedback via email and Yahoo message boards.
Besides My Yahoo Search, the new contextual search tool YQ is available for testing on Yahoo Next. Bradley described YQ as “putting search at the moment of (users’) inspiration… [where] dynamic HTML springs open a little search box which allows users to search for contextual related topics.”
Yahoo Video Search – Yahoo’s new video search offering allows the user to search for video clips which are ranked via page content, incoming links, and file names associated with the video clip. Yahoo is innovating the inclusion of video into its index by offering publishers such as iFilm the option of submitting video clips to Yahoo via an XML feed, which can further define the content of the video, which itself is not able to be read by the Yahoo Slurp robot.
Apparently Netflix and Blockbuster have not jumped on the video search opportunity of including hosting previews and clips of films available for rental on their web sites.
