Yahoo Attempts to Regain the Search Crown
January 30, 2014
Yahoo has not been the top search engine for a long time and they have focused their energies on other promising projects. CEO Marissa Mayer kept search in the back of her mind when she purchased Aviate, creator of a contextual app search and organization for mobile phone users. Business Insider describes the acquisition in “Yahoo Just Acquired A New Search Product That Could Hurt Google.”
According to the article, contextual search is very important to technology companies and many already have projects concerning the new search trend in development.
What makes contextual or semantic search different? The article states:
“Basically, contextual search differs from the regular search you know on Google by trying to anticipate what you really mean or want based on cues in your past searches or in other stores of data the search tool has access to. It’s not just about matching keywords and ranking incoming links.”
Under Yahoo, Aviate’s product will organize phone apps on the home screen based on its best guess to what the user needs at the moment. Mayer is probably out to solve the app overload problem, where users download hundreds of apps and hardly use any of them. Aviate takes hide and seek out of finding apps. The search product will also locate items before users access other search applications.
Mayer has a good idea. Organize the tools that are supposed to make life easier. It also sounds like she is trying to set up the Yahoo equivalent of the Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store. What will she name it?
Whitney Grace, January 30, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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