Yahoo! Bangalore center innovates on web search concept

Bangalore: In its bid to pose a competition for Google, Yahoo! is re-strategizing its search engine business. And the innovation, called Web of Object philosophy, is being shaped up at its Bangalore Center of Excellence. The internet giant is of the opinion that search needs to be verticalised for its impact to be greater, reports Darlington Jose Hector of The Financial Express.

Yahoo! officials say that verticalisation of the search would involve throwing up a web of information linked to a particular person or subject for a more wholesome experience and not just myriad blue-links one can click on.

Verticalisation would mean there would be a dedicated page for a subject in the repository. Present search methods show results which may not be suited to the information a user is looking for. Yahoo! will bring together its other resources like Yahoo! News to build a page dedicated to the subject. The page search results will show latest YouTube videos related to the subject, Flickr pictures and latest tweets.

Yahoo! added that the dedicated page would automatically refresh itself with the latest news on the subject. Yahoo!'s search business partner, Microsoft, will help this innovation by powering the results with web crawling and indexing.

Shouvick Mukherjee, Vice President and Head, Yahoo! India Research & Development, said, "We are focusing on innovating verticalised search within specific categories like sports, movies and business. We are also incorporating visual search. Video and image search are already present. One can also search in vernacular languages, besides searching through sketching a map."

The future of search engines is very diverse, with them being ncorporated in a whole range of devices from cars and phones to television sets. Other innovations would include voice search, which is currently seeing improvisations. Mukherjee added, "We plan to make the keyboard redundant in a web search. Gesture-based search is also in the labs now."

With firms like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! going all out to innovate new models of search engines, the future beholds a new technological revolution in this arena.