Yahoo! Search will soon be open to 3rd party development, and the expected results look very useful. Yahoo! Search will soon be open to 3rd party development, and the expected results look very useful.
Yahoo! Search’s new open platform will give site owners much greater control over what is presented when their page shows up in Yahoo! Search results. Instead of a simple title and an abstract URL, they can present ratings, reviews, images, etc… to display right in the results.
This will have a mutually beneficial effect for users and site owners: users don’t have to waste unnecessary clicks on a link that might not have the information they’re looking for, and the website owners get more focused, quality traffic.
First responses to the proposed changes are for the most part favorable, though a lot of users are wondering how Yahoo! will keep this system from being abused, i.e. become another tool for those nefarious, moustache-twisting spammers. There’s no word back from Yahoo! on that front.
Yahoo! has yet to implement the new open Search, but their sneak preview is enough to whet our appetites. Kudos to Yahoo! for continuing to move forward in the highly competitive world of online search.