Search Engines and Algorithms: Optimizing for Yahoo! Search and AltaVista

Search Engines and Algorithms: Optimizing for Yahoo! Search and AltaVista

Yahoo is considered the number one search engine above all other search engines. Yahoo search queries make up approximately 28% of all search engine traffic. And just in raw traffic reported by Alexa rankings, Yahoo! demolishes competitors such as Google and MSN. The Y! web portal has continued to offer its visitors comprehensive searching capabilities through its evolving algorithm. Search optimizers would be wise to consider its attributes and quirks, which Jennifer Sullivan reviews in the second part of this series.

Yahoo has changed its search engine several times drastically. Yahoo is striving to produce relevant results to its searchers in areas that computer algorithms simply fall short, areas like opinions and personalized results. For example, “What is the best online electronics site?” or “Who has the best Italian cuisine in town?” are representative of questions that would be an opinion that a searcher would be interested in, but is difficult for a search engine algorithm to put them in touch with. Personal results are indicative of a user’s personal preferences, and not based solely upon the opinion of the majority, and serendipity brings to mind the notion of becoming familiar with the searcher’s own tastes, such as what might be personally relevant to a user, or something family and friends would be a better source of information regarding, rather than a machine. Searching for the term “apple” doesn’t always mean that a user is looking for Macintosh computers.

Yahoo! Social Search

With this in mind, Yahoo introduced Social Search, called My Web 2.0. It is a new kind of search engine – a social search engine – that complements web search by enabling users to search the knowledge and expertise of their friends and community in addition to the web.

The technology powering the social search is called MyRank. According to Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 FAQ, “MyRank leverages all the advances in algorithmic search and combines these advances with a very simple idea - your definition of a 'better answer' may be very different than somebody else's definition. The MyRank technology powering My Web 2.0 enables you to tap into the knowledge of the people you know, and leverage this knowledge to find better answers that are more relevant to you. Friends, colleagues, and other contacts in your community are invaluable sources of information and advice in the offline world. These are the people that share your interests, work in your industry, live in your neighborhood, and have potentially searched for many of the same topics as you - along with topics that you never thought of in relation to the people you know. By fusing the power of algorithmic search with the ability to tap into your community, MyRank technology enables you to find better, more relevant answers for you.”

The way they accomplish this is by adding the ability to tag, save, and then share information with other people, as well as obtain the information that other people wish to share with you. Instead of simply book-marking a page, you have the enhanced ability to tag a bookmarked page with keywords you assign to it. This allows a user to comment on pages they find useful, then give extra information about it to others in the community the user builds. Then, when web searches are performed, not only algorithmic findings are used, but also the information in the personal tags saved by the user, which provides personalized search results based on the shared knowledge of the people they trust.

Social search complements web search, which is driven by publishers and web sites, by providing a better search experience that is powered by people and communities. We’ll talk more about other social searches in a later article in this series.