Yahoo and Google Give Their Search Engines a Tune Up

Yahoo was the first major search engine to become wildly popular with today’s Internet users. And Google has become such a popular search engine that the site’s name is now a verb listed in Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary. But rather than sit on their laurels and enjoy their successes, both sites have recently announced that they are revving up their engines to provide more personalization of search results.

Google’s new personalized search engine draws on a user’s search history to help tweak the "hits" they get as a result of a search. For example, if a Google user has done lots of searches for sports cars and then searches for the word "Jaguar," the list of sites generated will be related to cars, not big spotted cats. Google’s approach is a welcome enhancement for searchers who are tired of having to sift through all the hits that are just marginally related to their search before they can get down to the nitty-gritty of what they were looking for in the first place. But Yahoo’s new updated engine is even more remarkable.

Instead of using the standard search algorithms that have become the staple of all search engines, Yahoo draws on its huge community of regular users (over 80 million Internetters) to help them assign relevance and rank to search results. Yahoo’s MyWeb allows users to designate sites as worthy of being recommended to other Yahoo users. By doing this type of ranking, a Yahoo user can search through only the sites recommended by other users in his or her Yahoo communities, search through the sites recommended by the MyWeb community at large, or search the entire Web without using the MyWeb interface. Users of MyWeb can save their own preferred sites by giving it a personalized title, providing a few keywords to help the site come up in searches, and then specify whether the site should be saved individually, shared with others in the local Yahoo community, or shared with the Yahoo community at large.

The keywords provided by Yahoo visitors are the key to MyWeb being so useful, since a site designer may not think of all the keywords that will help people find that site, so Internet users can help them out in that area. The core of MyWeb that allows Yahoo users to provide these keywords was designed by Flickr, a photo-sharing community that Yahoo acquired in March. Flickr uses tags to help people sort and find photos online, upload them, and share them with others. "The Flickr folks worked heavily on this," says Eckard Walther, vice president of products at Yahoo's search division. "Flickr does for photos what we want to do for the Web."

The new search engines launched by Google and Yahoo are in their infancy, so it’s too early to know yet whether users will cheer them or hate them. Yahoo has surprised many in the Web world by even attempting such dramatic changes to its main product. But Walther is nonplussed by the surprise. "Yahoo is getting back to the roots of the company," says Walther, responding to a comment that Yahoo released a beta product of its new design only because Google always does that. "It's the way we used to do it. The company was founded by two engineering students—and this is all about engineering." With MyWeb 2.0, Yahoo is clearly attempting to dethrone Google as the leader in Web searching. With its new approach that taps into recommendations by the actual people using the search engine, it may just have a shot at doing that. According to Greg Sterling, an analyst with The Kelsey Group, all eyes are focused on Yahoo to gauge the success of this new endeavor. "Yahoo is trying to find new relevance. MyWeb 2.0 adds the community layer and brings in people capturing content, something Google doesn't have."