Yahoo is testing a new way to display search engine results to the users, something completely different then the usual "10 blue links" way. Instead of just displaying the top 10 search results for a search, that's the usual way today, Yahoo will try to find out the "intent" of the users search, and then present various types of information within the results that relate to what they are looking for, such as restaurant reviews, movie times, flight schedules and so on.

If for example a user search for the name of a restaurant Yahoo will show a map showing the location followed by photos, reviews and directions since that is most likely what  the user is looking for with that type of search.

Yahoo is saying that they want to move searching from "web of pages" to "web of objects" instead.

The goal is to organize results in a way that reflects how those objects relate to each other in real life. Searching for "Paris," for example, should reveal related "objects" such as travel guides, cheap airplane tickets, and images of the city — in short, all the related content users might want to see.

All the other big search engines are trying something similar too, so we should soon start seeing the results of their work

Twitter will also start with new searching, or at least improve their search content by indexing the pages people twitter about. So next time you twitter about a web page Twitter may actually include the complete page in their search engine.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Search Engines & Directories, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.