Yahoo ponders the meaning of search

From CNET News.com: Yahoo is in the midst of a grand transition as a company, with a pending deal to sell its search assets to Microsoft in exchange for a healthy portion of the revenue generated by searches on Yahoo's pages. Yet some in the company seem a bit perturbed by talk that it's giving up on the search market.

"With all of the events that Yahoo has gone through in the last several months, one of the questions I get is: 'Does Yahoo still care about search?' The answer is: Absolutely," wrote David Pann, Yahoo vice president and general manager of search marketing, in a blog post Tuesday highlighting enhancements to Yahoo's search ads.

The thing is, Pann isn't talking about search (the business of crawling the Web, indexing the results, and matching the data against queries) so much as he is search presentation, the business of arranging the data produced by search queries in an artful and useful fashion. Under the deal Yahoo signed with Microsoft (assuming it passes regulatory review), Microsoft will be the exclusive provider of search results on Yahoo's Web pages, although Yahoo will retain the right to control the way those results are presented.

It's the manifestation of how Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz sees the search market. She recently compared Yahoo's plans for search to the way PC makers like Hewlett-Packard and Dell build different products around a common Intel chip, implying that the core search business is perhaps a commodity and what draws in the user is the fancy packaging.

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