Search will evolve beyond 10 blue links and users will be presented with rich results instead of generic text,” says Rajeev Rastogi, VP and head of Yahoo! Labs India and he’s not making a prediction but stating the direction Yahoo’s search will be taking in the future, based on research his team is doing at the company.
“The idea is to dynamically create pages on a topic when a query is made. For example, if one searches for ‘Madonna’, this search will go through news, blogs, tweets, and create a multimedia page which will have all the information the user needs. Yahoo! has a lot of information from many properties, which will all be synthesised into a page,” Rastogi says.
This feature will be similar to cpedia.com, a website created by a bunch of ex-Googlers who set up a search engine called cuil.com, but failed to meet the hype.
Cpedia, too, came under criticism for presenting generic information and for being disjointed grammatically. Yahoo’s venture, however, won’t face such issues, says Rastogi. “We have systems which are used for extracting the most relevant sentences from a page and presenting it in search results, so there shouldn’t be any issues,” he says.
The other area Yahoo! Labs is looking at is a natural language search (a system where you put in direct queries instead of keywords), which Rastogi feels is still in an elementary stage.
“Search based on natural language needs more research and it will be the topic of discussion at the Yahoo Big T series, scheduled on June 11,” he says.
Apart from doing research within the company, Labs has also tied up with reputed Indian institutes such as the IITs and IISc, Bangalore for conducting research in the fields of machine learning.
“We are doing a research with IIT-Bombay on collaboration of search and information extraction. Then with IIT-Hyderabad we are researching machine translation of Indian languages and with IISc we are working on creating a scalable system for indexing billions of pages,” he says.
Additionally, to enhance its advertising potential, Yahoo! has collaborated with IISC to find a mechanism that’ll help predict the possibility of a user clicking on an ad.
Another interesting research that Yahoo! is carrying out in Bangalore is centred on Yahoo’s social networking site — Yahoo Profiles. Yahoo! on Monday announced a deeper tie-up of their Yahoo Profiles section with Facebook, which will be renamed as Yahoo Pulse, which is in addition to the integration of Facebook updates within Yahoo mail implemented earlier.
“At Labs, we’re looking at information propagates through a social network. We’re also looking at ways to discover who the influencers are and also observing the activity of users to see how we could use the information to create a profile,” Rastogi added. If it succeeds, Yahoo Pulse will bring Yahoo back to spotlight in the social networking domain and help revive Yahoo mail, which is facing serious competition from Google’s Gmail.
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