Yahoo! is changing to an open approach to search results

Yahoo! just announced the new approach they are about to implement for returning search query information. This is quite interesting and actually makes a lot of sense to me. I applaud them for the foresight they are displaying and really hope with this new implementation that they can re-gain some of the market share lost due to Google’s dominance the past few years.

After all, competition is a healthy thing that ultimately will bring the users (us) a better product. To be honest, Google is (in my experience) sometimes returning very skewed or irrelevant search results and I am finding myself having to search further and further down the first page and even sometimes need to explore the second page for what I am looking for.

The “open theme” announcement by Yahoo! will allow website owners to submit relevant information about their products and services and 3rd party website to contribute their relevant information, which will be displayed along side the listing which will likely also include relevant images for visual aid. Yahoo!’s intent is to present users with richer, more useful and more relevant search results.

The open theme platform will be open to all website owners and businesses (big and small), which will create opportunities to present more useful information on the Yahoo! search page.

Let’s take a look at an example:

This is the current standard search output by Yahoo!, Google and MSN:

This method uses the standard page title tag, meta description and URL which is decided upon by the search algorithm program.

The new search output will look like this!

So now Website owners along with 3rd part review/rating sites will be able to display relevant and useful results alongside the listing which could benefit the user significantly in his or her decision making.

3rd party website owners like Yelp, WebMD, The New York Times or any site with useful content can now supply Yahoo! with relevant data and Yahoo!’s patented Machined Learned Ranking system will ensures that these results are presented to their users along relevant listings.

Users will benefit from this information because their search results will be full of useful relevant data. And websites will benefit as the traffic that is sent to the website will be more targeted and of higher quality.

Also, users will be in complete control of their search experience and will be able to turn on or off anything related to open search if they wish to do so.

Yahoo! will reveal further information on this open search approach over the coming month so stay tuned!