Yahoo! Search will soon be open to 3rd party development, and the expected results look very useful. Yahoo! Search's new open platform will give site owners much greater control over what is presented when their page shows up in Yahoo! Search results. Instead of a simple title and an abstract URL, they can present ratings, reviews, images, etc... to display right in the results.
This will have a mutually beneficial effect for users and site owners: users don't have to waste unnecessary clicks on a link that might not have the information they're looking for, and the website owners get more focused, quality traffic.
First responses to the proposed changes are for the most part favorable, though a lot of users are wondering how Yahoo! will keep this system from being abused, i.e. become another tool for those nefarious, moustache-twisting spammers. There's no word back from Yahoo! on that front.
Yahoo! has yet to implement the new open Search, but their sneak preview is enough to whet our appetites. Kudos to Yahoo! for continuing to move forward in the highly competitive world of online search.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
2-28-2008 @ 11:58AM
todd lucier said...
If business users keep the needs of buyers in mind, this could be a very very good thing... search results as micro home page! Interesting novel idea.
todd.
http://www.tourismkeys.ca/blog.html
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3-29-2008 @ 1:03PM
iheartyahoo said...
moustache-twisting spammers? ha!
I think it will be abused either way, be it by spammers, BH SEO's or normal SEO's, even regular webmasters. The whole rating thing should not be too simple, like a one click rating feature, sure that's convenient but there is no way to prevent that feature from being abused then. Webmasters can get some loyal users to click, paid clicks, they could go as far as using a proxie to rate rate rate!
Then the sad thing is the bombing of competitors with negative ratings, there's a lot to keep in mind and what I mentioned is not even scratching the surface.
Regardless of all the yinyan above, it is a creative feature, very nice if it can be implemented right.
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