Yahoo Focuses Search
August 7th, 2006
It looks like Yahoo has caught wind of the Rollyo effect, and have launched the Yahoo Search Builder, which allows users to tailor searches based on their interests.
The idea is to foster the creation of focused search interfaces. For example, if you’re into computer games, you can make a game-focused search for your website. The creation of the search is simple, and is very similar to services like Rollyo. On a basic level, search is focused by specifying a list of sites that are to be searched. Yahoo also allows you to add keywords that will be included in every search, exclude keywords, and exclude certain sites from being shown in the results.
After customizing the look and feel, users paste some code on their sites to publicize their searches.
Yahoo’s effort is lax compared to that of Rollyo, which gets much deeper into user involvement with the use star-powered searches from celebrities and featured searches. I’m sure Yahoo is working on the community aspect, but, it may be too little too late.
On a more nit-picky point, is anyone else bothered by images implanted in text forms? At first, I mistook the Yahoo search box for an image with a border around it (so I was wondering where the search box was). They need to either make the image lighter, or get rid of it entirely to avoid confusion.
It looks like Yahoo has caught wind of the Rollyo effect, and have launched the Yahoo Search Builder, which allows users to tailor searches based on their interests.
The idea is to foster the creation of focused search interfaces. For example, if you’re into computer games, you can make a game-focused search for your website. The creation of the search is simple, and is very similar to services like Rollyo. On a basic level, search is focused by specifying a list of sites that are to be searched. Yahoo also allows you to add keywords that will be included in every search, exclude keywords, and exclude certain sites from being shown in the results.
After customizing the look and feel, users paste some code on their sites to publicize their searches.
Yahoo’s effort is lax compared to that of Rollyo, which gets much deeper into user involvement with the use star-powered searches from celebrities and featured searches. I’m sure Yahoo is working on the community aspect, but, it may be too little too late.
On a more nit-picky point, is anyone else bothered by images implanted in text forms? At first, I mistook the Yahoo search box for an image with a border around it (so I was wondering where the search box was). They need to either make the image lighter, or get rid of it entirely to avoid confusion.
