Yahoo opens up

26 February 2008

Yahoo has announced that it will 'open' its search platform to third parties.

The company says that the change, which will not affect the order in which results are displayed, will allow web site owners to "present more useful information on the Yahoo! Search page as compared to what is presented on other search engines".

Currently, all major search engines display a website's URL and title, and some descriptive text that is either specified by the webmaster, or relevant to the user's search term.

After the changes, for which there is as yet no launch date, Yahoo will present "rich results" including, for example, images and other content gathered from within the target website.

A second initiative, due to launch on Tuesday, is Yahoo Buzz, a social news-aggregating site similar to Digg. Techcrunch reports that the most popular Buzz stories will appear alongside search results on the Yahoo front page.

The initiatives are likely to keep Yahoo in the spotlight for reasons other than Microsoft's recent takeover bid.

The latest figures published by net analysts Nielsen Online reveal that Yahoo's share of the US search market rose from 17.7% in December 2007 to 19.0% in January. Arch-rival Google grew its share by 0.6% in the month, processing 56.9% of all US search traffic in January.

Both may have profited at the expense of Windows Live Search, which dropped sharply from a 13.8% share in December to 12.1% in January.

Category: Google, Natural search, Search engines, Yahoo