Yahoo's search model developing a new face, SF Chronicle (Apr 29)
Yahoo, having just come to an agreement to outsource web search to Microsoft, is investigating other ways of navigation and search that involve social networking, and location aware models.
Yahoo noted in its studies that less time is being spent in traditional web search - "It found that people only spend about one-sixth of their online time performing searches. That compares with half of their time for browsing and one-third for communicating, according to aggregated data pulled from the Yahoo Toolbar, a downloadable browser feature that provides quick links to a user's favorite content."
Two areas of interest are social media - especially Twitter and what it indicates for popular interest, and using images to refine results.
More detail in Yahoo Study Shows Search Responsible for 1 in 5 Pageviews Online, SEO by the SEA (Apr 28)
"This study tells us that 8 days of Yahoo toolbar data, collecting the browsing activity of a large number of people, indicates that searches of the Web, multimedia, and items take up about 10 percent of all pages viewed online, and those search starting points lead to another 11 percent of pages viewed on the Web. "
There is also a breakdown of the type of web search - "They noticed that about 50 percent of queries refered directly to some kind of specific item or object, that 8.5 percent were about some broad topic or concept, and smaller percentages of searches included things like searches for URLs of pages and for navigational queries that didn’t include URLs but were aimed at bringing searchers to specific pages."
Posted by Gwen at May 1, 2010 09:49 PM