Yahoo! looks to shake up search and browsing

Thursday, May 31, 2012

Gulf News

Dubai Yahoo! has reworked its internet search engine to make it easier for users to find information without clicking through page after page. It has released Axis in the US which will work only on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch for now as Yahoo! believes mobile is where the action is.

It will be available at a later date in the Middle East, though no timeframe was revealed. “The search engine can display search results in a panorama of visual thumbnails that can be scrolled through above a web page,” said Ahmad Naseef, vice-president and managing director, Yahoo! Maktoob.

Departure

“It’s a departure from the traditional presentation of a list of staid web links that require more navigation and guesswork.”

The Android version of Axis is still in development. Google already has two of its own browsers for mobile. Three weeks ago, Microsoft previewed an upcoming change that will spread Bing’s search results over three columns, including one devoted to personalised recommendations pulled from Facebook, Twitter and other social networking services.

Google unveiled a new search feature called a ‘Knowledge Graph’ that seeks to provide more immediate answers by highlighting information from a database containing more than 500 million entries about people, places and other commonly requested things.

Yahoo! is counting on Axis to reverse its declining share of the internet’s lucrative search market and bring in more traffic from smartphone and tablet users.

Mobile users who get the app installed can see their search results at the top of the screen by flicking on whatever page is displayed. The relevant results appear in a ribbon of web page snapshots.

Yahoo has relied on Bing’s technology since 2010. So far, most of Bing’s gains have come at Yahoo’s expense.

Axis draws its results from a custom-built index. Most of the data resides on Yahoo!’s own services. If Axis can’t find answers there, it presents links from Bing’s search index.

“If it’s good enough and cool enough, people will go out of their way to get it,” said IDC analyst Karsten Weide.

By Naushad K. Cherrayil?Staff Reporter