Yahoo! Search
Open Ecosystem
BayCHI talk
Micah Alpern
Larry Cornett.
Design Director
VP Search Product
Search Ecosystem

What is Open Search?
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Search Technology (YST)

Search Today
10 Blue links
Limited Choice
• Three players dominate
the market, giving users
limited choice
• Neither site owners nor
searchers can exert much
influence on what
information is presented

Search Tomorrow

Yahoo! Search Ecosystem
Ecosystems thrive
from win wins
• For Searchers
• Site Owners
• and Developers
Building a richer, more relevant, and more personal
search experience.

What is Open Search?
Yahoo!

What is Open Search?
Yahoo!

Opening search -
what does it mean?
• Clear win for: developers, site
owners, users and Yahoo!
• Go from “to-do” to “done”
BEFORE
AFTER

Site Owners
• Straight to the answers
• Increase in quality of site traffic
• Fosters loyalty and engagement
BEFORE
AFTER
Enhanced Results and Infobars:
Ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and
other name-value pairs.

Enhanced Result: what can a developer
build?
deep
links
images
name/value
pairs or
abstract
YAHOO! CONFIDENTIAL | 10

SearchMonkey
An open platform for using structured data to
build more useful and relevant search results
After
Before
YAHOO! CONFIDENTIAL | 11

The SearchMonkey Ecosystem
XML / API /
Display
RDFa Personalized
Publisher
SERP
Content
Submission
SearchMonkey
Users
Publishers
Templates/
PHP
Developer
Tool
Developers

Infobar: what can a developer build?
Pull in data
from any
web service
YAHOO! CONFIDENTIAL | 13

Infobar: what might a developer build?
Open
canvas for
HTML

Infobar: what might a developer build?
YAHOO! CONFIDENTIAL | 15

Search Monkey Design Process
Generative Studies Lab and Bucket testing
Eye Tracking

What is Open Search?
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Search Technology (YST)

What is Open Search?
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Search Technology (YST)

Opening our platform
Becoming a serious Search principal requires a massive capital
investment (~$300MM)
– People, knowledge, experience
– Hardware, operations, and infrastructure
– Data, relevance and ranking models
Classifying, rewriting, spell check, routing, caching
Query Handling
Query Handling
MLR models (massive data required)
Ranking
Ranking
Massive database (scalable, fast, and redundant)
Index
Index
Crawl Detect spam, de-dupe URLs, track updates
Crawl

BOSS Vision
No matter where you are on the
Web, search experiences are
relevant, comprehensive, fresh and
well-presented.

4 hoursearch

PlayerSearch

NewsLine

Tianomo

Yahoo Open Search
http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/
http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/