Yahoo! Trying to Hit Google Where It Hurts

For those of you that have not got off the Yahoo! horse and continue betting on it, here’s a sign that things will start to pick themselves up: Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Yahoo!’s vice president of research for Europe and Latin America said in an interview today that structured search will be available shortly in order to make
the Internet easier to navigate.

As an example, he presented the case of the "mobile phone" query that, apart from the usual search results containing the actual words, will also pull down menus with choices including mobile phone brands, technologies and specifications plus other features. The best area for this new search function is obviously e-commerce, and this is where Google should start moving its ears to start catching words.

A more specific search that would benefit e-tailers, as well as the regular Joe that doesn’t want to buy something, will, in my opinion, always be favored and chosen ahead of one that does either alone at the same quality.
John Riberio says that "Once the user has made a selection on the menus, Yahoo Search will give the user a list of mobile phones meeting the specifications, their prices, and the Web sites where they can be purchased." A much more interesting option than just clicking from link to link in order to find something that suits you best.

The second announcement that Baeza-Yates made is that Yahoo! is working on a new distributed search architecture that would make local search a lot faster by setting up a network of datacenters in many countries, so that the queries submitted locally are handled faster locally at the datacenter in the country. "The problem, which we are trying to solve, is to make the search for global queries also fast, as the latency of the network is the main problem," he added.