Yahoo! and the future of search, Emma Barnett, Telegraph (Feb 27)
Another article in which Yahoo says it is still doing search even though it is going to be using the bing index.
Yoelle Maarek, senior director of Yahoo! Research, explained that the arrangement with Microsoft "should be seen as liberating Yahoo! to focus on front-end search innovations, rather than spending time and money on ensuring the back-end technology is working well. If anything, says Maarek, the Microsoft deal has freed the company up to start fighting the search war in the most important area – the bit the consumer can see. Yahoo!’s search teams are planning to launch several new initiatives in this area over the coming months, to try and steal share from search Goliath Google, and also, somewhat confusingly, from Bing, the search platform of Microsoft, its new partner. "
That's good - because we need the competition in features and ranking - the crawling has been taken care of.
Maarek names three areas:
1. anticipating user intent
2. make searching easier - eg SearchPad
3. ‘web of things’ concept - variety of types of results (like Kosmix)