Search Is Opening Up

Yahoo! Search gives Web site owners ways to make their search results more relevant

You’ve been hearing a lot of talk from us lately about openness—open ad exchanges and open development platforms—but now Yahoo! Search itself is open. As an advertiser, this gives you a way to add much more relevant information about your site to our search results—and have more control over the way that information is displayed.

“Because the platform is open it gives all Web site owners—big or small—an opportunity to present more useful information on the Yahoo! Search page, as compared to what is presented on other search engines,” says Vish Makhijani, SVP & GM, Yahoo! Search in a blog post this week. Instead of just a title, abstract and URL, you can add into your search results the data currently buried in your websites—things like ratings, reviews and images.

You should read the whole post on the Yahoo! Search Blog, but to whet your appetite, here are before-and-after examples of the difference when a social media site like Yelp starts adding some of its content to search results:

Before:

After:

You’ll be hearing more about this change in the next few months. Time to start thinking about how openness could help you.

—The Team