Yahoo wants to kill the ten blue links. The company thinks its customers don’t care about the how many pages a search engine indexes — nor do they want to search. They want answers.
At least, that’s what Prabhakar Raghavan, who heads Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy told a group of reporters Tuesday.
The idea is to take the insights the company figured out from mobile devices — which is about answers, not document retrieval — and taking that to web search.
Yahoo says it wants to pull out information from webpages, so that its index knows when a page is about a thing — a museum, a person, a restaurant. That let’s the engine know what kind of food a place serves, what its hours are, and how to return an answer that isn’t just a link.
That’s a fine vision — one that search engine engineers have been dreaming of for years, but it’s not simple to move from a mess of HTML pages to a organized library of the internet.
[via wired.com/epicenter]
At least, that’s what Prabhakar Raghavan, who heads Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy told a group of reporters Tuesday.
The idea is to take the insights the company figured out from mobile devices — which is about answers, not document retrieval — and taking that to web search.
Yahoo says it wants to pull out information from webpages, so that its index knows when a page is about a thing — a museum, a person, a restaurant. That let’s the engine know what kind of food a place serves, what its hours are, and how to return an answer that isn’t just a link.
That’s a fine vision — one that search engine engineers have been dreaming of for years, but it’s not simple to move from a mess of HTML pages to a organized library of the internet.
[via wired.com/epicenter]
