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Yahoo Debuts Service It Calls the “Future of Search”

Yahoo has debuted a new search product it calls Search Direct in an attempt to gain ground on the world's search leader Google and its own search partner, Microsoft's Bing.  Yahoo is describing the new offering as “the fastest thing you have ever seen.”  The technology combines instant search, or the display of search results as queries are typed, with instant answers.  This means that if a user were to type “amzn”, Yahoo would instantly display a box with stock quotes related to Amazon.com.  For searches the site has no answer to, the box would display search links in an easy-to-navigate format.

Yahoo, which many insiders thought was on its way out of the search game after it outsourced its search backend to Microsoft, says the new technology represents the future of Internet search.  Search Direct has been enabled on search.yahoo.com and a number of Yahoo's other US properties, but has not been installed yet on Yahoo's homepage.  A spokesman says the feature will find its way to the homepage soon, and will eventually be available on a number of non-Yahoo sites, as well.

Search Direct reportedly has “answers” for 15 categories of entities, which include movies, professional athletes, celebrities, news, music, weather, shopping, local, and stocks.  The feature builds on Yahoo's efforts to remain relevant in the search market by focusing on improvements to the user's experience.  Yahoo says the new technology is superior to Google's Instant Search feature, which it says simply produces search results faster, while Search Direct brings users answers at an incredibly rapid pace.

The service, Yahoo says, will be available to all Internet users, regardless of connection speed.  The feature uses existing infrastructure owned by Yahoo, which could cause conflict between the company and its search partner Bing.  The company says that it could eventually develop new ad formats to display in the Search Direct box, but it has yet to determine if or how it would share those revenues with Microsoft, like it currently does with search ads.

Yahoo continues to maintain that it developed instant search technology first, though it failed to release it before Google, and that it owns patents on Instant Search and the new Search Direct technologies.  The company intends to license the new technology to other tech firms and is excited that it has developed the future of Web search, even though tech insiders have written the company off as a third-place player in the search game that is destined to keep losing market share.