Yahoo’s Search Direct and your SEO
Created on Thursday, 14 April 2011 20:14 Published Date Hits: 598
It’s been some time since Yahoo! and search were discussed together in the same sentence and, in that space of time, many of the trends regarding SEO in 2011 I wrote about back in 2010 have become part of many webmasters’ every day life.
Yahoo! this week unveiled a new search product called Search Direct which it will make available, as time goes on, with all its global search properties. This is yet another result of the power of the real-time web and the pressure the trend is putting on major online companies.
In brief, the real-time web is the way we are heading. This is because we are addicted to interaction, accessibility and speed. Facebook created the first taste for it with its Wall and the comments system. Twitter has made it global and pithy and Google Instant has us all addicted to the one-finger search which itself is affecting optimization techniques as it affects end-user behaviour.
Yahoo’s Search Direct is the latest offering in this direction. Ever since Microsoft started supplying Yahoo! search results search on the web has been a two-horse race with Google so far ahead as to be practically a dot in Microsoft’s search horizon. Search Direct is powered by Microsoft so, new as it may be, it is unlikely to be a game changer in search and it is also unlikely that it will impact on your SEO work.
Right now (and I hope it changes in the near future) it is not even very good. A quick search for my name, for instance threw up some results I expected but omitted others which I would have thought would be the first point of call. Google, on the other hand, covered everything and also threw in some suggestions which had I been searching for me would have made the search easier, faster and given me more results.
This makes Google the instant winner (pun unintended) in Instant Search. It is still early days though and you never know, Yahoo! might improve which means that we’ll have again a little more competition in search. Either way you only really need to optimize for one search engine and that is Google. Google’s search is so far ahead of the game that everyone sooner or later follows them.
