Yahoo's Raghavan describes linkless search

Hi Steve,
great post. i think there has been a tenuous balance for a long time between web content owners/creators and search engines. we all create and allow spidering and therefore the business of search, in order to get the good: traffic that is a good match back to the web content.

if that agreement is broken, i think you will see what currently happens now with most video hosting sites: they block spidering because they want search engines to talk to them first, and get privately held data about what they offer.

can you imagine a web that fragments again, because search engines decide to break this?

the value of yahoo asking for structured data and also offering it is that they create a 'virtuous circle' encouraging others to do the same. at that point, with structured data, their search results have the possibility of becoming far more interesting than the current iteration of google's search.

that i think is what they want here.

but if you are right, above, we would have a real problem on the web, for everyone.

Hey, Mary!

Well, Google does this a bit today-- search maps, search for a business, such as a restaurant. Seems like Yahoo is playing catchup.

Remember there's targeted search and there's open-ended search; with the former being the sorts of queries you don't need web page results for (heck, I'd love to type a phone number on my non-iPhone, click a button, and get hours of operation and an address). Some of the search experts can tell you the amount of searches done on each, and the amount of SEO spending on each.

Hi Jon,
Yes, goog and others including Y! do it with their own generated info.. for maps, earth, etc., but doing this with other's webinfo is what I'm talking about. and that i think is where we would see the problem in breaking apart the fundamental agreements on the web.

right now on my treo, i can pop a number or a business name into goog, and immediately get the short hand info i need in their summaries of web pages. and then if i need more i can click through or click on the phone number to call the biz. very handy and i use it all the time.

but if search expanded beyond the quick summary, i think webpage owners would have an issue.

Fantastic Article.

Just came accross an odd engine by the name of http://www.OneClickSearchEngine.com which I found rather interesting.

They are pushing the concept of Pay Per Keyword whereby they simplify search by having advertisers be the sole owners of search phrases?? and say they run audits quarterly to keep results on the up & up.

I guess the argument is why not??

I mean at the end of the day SEO is soooo hard to do, takes time just to have google changes their algo and you are right back where you started.

and SEM, well think of all the time you need to spend to optimize bidding, nail down landing pages. You might as well hire a firm, which leaves you wondering where all your profits went??

This without doubt will not change anything, maybe just add a new Pay Per ??? Method to the already confusing mix..

Any Thoughts??

Interesting concept. Perhaps Yahoo! would go this route - I think it will severely diminish their search share even more than it has already been diminished. I doubt Google would consider this though. Google is smart enough to know that the Internet is bigger, brighter, and badder then anything it can offer on its own. Obviously, Google has the most sophisticated web-based technology online, but it can't compete with over 50+ billion pages of content created by millions of people across the world. Nothing will ever take away from indexing, categorizing, and serving up the best content for the appropriate keyword. Trying to take the content of others and use it in such a scale will ultimately lead to copyright infringement issues, or will lead to a mass no-indexing of the Yahoo! engine will which destroy their engine by systematically reducing the size and quality of their database. I'd think real hard about going that route - just because Google is the dominant player, and continues to take away market share doesn't mean making rash moves will be beneficial. Sounds like bad decision to me, but hey what do I know :)

Lets say this happens, you really think people will be willing to simply give you content? LOL yeah right.

If this is true, Yahoo will lead the way to how search results should always have been. Based on relevancy of the content or the "context" and not based on the number of links and other factors.

Do you think there can be some technical or usability reasons...:)