Yahoo Aims To Redefine What It Means To Search
At media event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Yahoo Search executives insisted that Internet users don't want to search. "Nobody really wants to search," declared Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy. "People want to run their lives."
The stated theme for the press briefing was "The End of the 10 Blue Links," a title that reflects an evolution of Yahoo's search strategy beyond document retrieval. As described by Raghavan, Yahoo is directing its search efforts toward assessing user intent.
When a user types "Star Trek," Raghavan said, he doesn't want 10 million documents, he wants actors and show times. Yahoo's bid to redefine search as a matter of intent rather than index size can be seen as an admission that it can't match Google's index.
