YAHOO! Strategy to Fundamentally Alter Searching

Why YAHOO! is Changing the Nature of Search. How YAHOO! Will Use Google's Own Weakness Against Them.


With a sexy IPO, high stock prices and the media's Google-mania, Google has stolen the spotlight from YAHOO! over most of 2005. Even though the two major search engines provide roughly equal volumes of search results to users. Now YAHOO! is launching a counter-strategy that has great potential to regain the attention of web-searchers.

YAHOO! is positioned as more of a content portal with a loyal base of Yahoo mail users and services like their RSS reader. But searching through all this content is a fundamental problem. YAHOO's recent purchase of Del.icio.us, makes it clear that YAHOO! is seeking to further redefine search. If YAHOO! succeeds, the search playing field will be fundamentally changed, to YAHOO!'s benefit. The first clue to YAHOO!'s strategy was their MINDSET SEARCH demo launched in May of 2005. The MINDSET demo was a system to rank and sort search results for your query into commercial or non-commercial (informational) results, based on whether you're shopping or seeking information. A slider at the top of the search results allows a user to select search results more attuned to shopping or more attuned to gathering information.

According to the YAHOO Mindset FAQ:

Commercial implies that the primary purpose of a given page is to sell you something. Informational implies that the primary purpose of the page is to provide information related to your search.

If you're involved with SEO or Pay Per Click, you probably see the internet as a chaotic universe of legitimate merchants and bewildered shoppers who have to sort through too much information to buy what they want.

Search and search marketing are the Market Place Makers. Search Engines and Pay Per Click Marketing solve the problem of bringing customers together with the Merchants who have what they want. Search Engines are vital to the Internet marketplace and WEB 2.0.

The major weakness of Google and many other search engines is that search results fail to separate spammy totally sales-oriented websites from useful and authoritative product information websites. The two are not exclusive. Many websites provide a mix of product information and hard-core sales. The worst example might be a web site selling some unneeded product with a slick sales pitch and almost no product information.

Google has a fundamental weakness. Google's search indexing tries to rank authoritative websites higher but many spammy-sales-oriented websites end up in the results with a low level of information. This is the weakness that YAHOO! is positioning itself to exploit.


YAHOO! Knows That the Crucial Question is This: WHY Does The web customer buy?
The best commercial websites help the customer to achieve comfort with the merchant and the product by giving the customer enough information to answer some very basic questions:

1.Does your web site have what the customer is looking for?
2.How will this product meet the customer’s needs or help them?
3.Is it easy and quick for the customer to buy the product or request more information?
4.Can the customer trust your company to deliver what you promise?

Answer these questions with solid, authoritative product information and you become the next Amazon or other trusted merchant. Merchant websites like Amazon have become trusted, profitable merchants by providing product reviews and good service.

Years ago FEDEX met the unexpected need for overnight delivery and became a market leader. If YAHOO! can redefine the type of Search results delivered by search engines they will gain a unique advantage over Google.

YAHOO! will meet the unmet need of search engine shoppers who are disappointed when their search engine click takes them to some sales cess-pool with more sales pitch and less product information. The YAHOO! MINDSET Search and the purchase of Del.icio.us will allow search users to choose quality sales sites and quality information sites.

Why did YAHOO buy Del.icio.us? Del.icio.us is a social networking site, like Digg or SLASHDOT. Basically editors or trusted web users select and rank news stories or web sites based on their authoritative value as information sites. While Google has always used numbers of quality links to determine the relative value of information or web sites, sites like Digg, Del.icio.us or SLASHDOT put people back into the equation to rank quality of information or web sites.

Essentially these sites fulfill the same function as a human indexed web directory like DMOZ. The advantage of social networking sites is that they overcome the slowness of a directory like DMOZ, with thousands of volunteers in their user community. This is a perfect fit for YAHOO!. YAHOO! has always created user communities with their products like YAHOO Groups, GEO Cities and loyal MY YAHOO! users.

This could mean that YAHOO will take the prize away from Google in the newly defined search arena. YAHOO!'s newly re-defined search arena will be all about search results with quality information and quality information-rich web sites.

Essentially, YAHOO and YAHOO social networks will be able to define the NEW trusted merchants and control which new merchants get the big market share.