Modern search has evolved greatly since those early days with long lists of links offering little to go on to determine quality or popularity. As search users have -- by and large -- become more sophisticated, we're seeing more sophisticated attempts at rethinking what search can be.
Since 2007, Google has been offering a blended result set, adding in image, news or other content to it's response to a user's query.
Now Yahoo is claiming it will offer much more in coming months to help provide results which match the emerging reality of the web. By grouping sets of related information together in a blended format, Yahoo asserts it wants its search products to reflect the reality that the web is about attribute-laden collections of objects (e.g., people, places, food, reviews, etc) and not simply an amalgam of individual web pages.
For example, a search on a particular car model would also pull up reviews, owners clubs, photos, financing information, pricing from local dealers and stock quotes for the manufacturer and so on. The objective is to create a platform which takes into account the relationship between sets of information users might draw on in everyday life relative to certain kinds of searches - buying a car, travel information on a city search, among others.
Not to be outdone, Google announced during Searchology 2009 its Rich Snippets concept which allows publishers like CNET, Yelp and others to display related information within a specific search result -- similar to Yahoo's Search Monkey platform which launched last year. Refining its existing blended results offering, Rich Snippets uses markup formats - like microformats and RDFa -- which developers can add to their web output for inclusion by Google and others who adopt these standards.
Is this the future of search? Possibly. We'll find out when Yahoo releases their 'objects'-focused results in the next 2-3 months. Stay tuned.
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