Some exciting things have been happening in the world of search.
At SMX West last week, Yahoo! announced their Open Search Platform. This was the talk of the town at SMX, and a novel idea from Yahoo. Basically, instead of just being able to somewhat control your search engine snippet with your title tag and description meta tag, later this year you will be able to customize what is shown, such as ratings, reviews, site links (like Google does now), an image, address, contact info, and more. Here is an example from the Yahoo Search Blog.
Before
After
Obviously if you are on the front page we’re going to see a skewing of what the normal percentages of users click on, because it’s going to stand out and be very functional and user friendly. Great move for Yahoo! too in empowering even the small business to stand out from the crowd and take search to a new level. Obviously Microsoft hasn’t taken over Yahoo! yet. 😉
On the Google front, several sites have reported Google adding another element to their Universal search, with a site search box right in the SERPs. Check this out:
Pretty handy and pretty interesting. I couldn’t duplicate it myself interestingly, it’s probably a limited data center roll out. I do find it interesting seeming Amazon has their own search, A9 search, which I haven’t heard mentioned for a long time. Of course it’s not really a search engine, more of a search aggregator.
I’ll put together the highlights of SMX and post that later this week, in case you missed it or don’t want to read through the live blogs (they’re actually pretty good).
