14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo may be using Bing to power its search engine, but it’s not giving up on search altogether. In fact, probably due to the fact that it’s been losing market share for many months now, Yahoo is working on weaving search into more of its many web properties. One section where search slits in nicely is Yahoo News. The company has started testing a new feature which enables users to quickly get more information on a particular subject in an article by doing a web search suggested by Yahoo.
“Search is evolving to mean more than entering keywords in a text box – at Yahoo! we believe it’s also about finding the right information at the right time. To help people discover information they want online, we’re enhancing and rolling out new search-powered features across the Yahoo! network,” Caroline Tsay, Director of Product Management for Yahoo Search and Marc Davis, Product Manager for Yahoo Search, wrote.
“One of these search-powered features is a new module for Yahoo! News, which we are giving you a preview today. With this module, we’ve begun adding related search content below news stories – we call these modules ‘Infinite Browse’ internally. We are currently only testing this module with a fraction of visitors, so if you can’t find it on Yahoo! News yet, stay tuned,” they added.
Below each article on Yahoo News, you’ll see a box which offers more info on the topic. It lists other stories on subjects related to the article, but it also shows some of the more popular searches for those subjects. The idea is to enable users to get more general information easily, without having to go to the search page and do their own queries.
Yahoo is also leveraging Search on other properties, notably on its homepage. The rather prominent Trending Now box shows the most popular searches of the moment depending on the context. On the homepage, it’s mostly celebrity news, on Yahoo Sports it will be for sports related searches and so on. These are not the only ways Yahoo is trying to integrate search into its properties. The fact is, search is big business and the loss of traffic for its search engine has been hurting Yahoo. The increased attention should help it drive up revenue numbers from Yahoo Search.