Ohk.. You might think why are we blogging this so late?? When half the world’s bloggers have reported analysed and given their comments. We got this press release early yesterday and have still been trying to figure out what was so great in what they launched. Don’t mind our dumb outlook but our question is -wasn’t this the feature that ask.com has been having since ages?? Try searching for the “Taj Mahal” on Ask.com. (for some of you who don’t know already – Yahoo! India launched what it claims is a “new concept” – a search experience that collates and integrates the most relevant information from across the Web onto a single “visual” search results page.)

 One of the sources on Glue Pages includes rival Google’s Blog Search! The aggregator also presents YouTube’s (another Google Company) videos where relevant This service seems to have been launched in India only.

For this search engine Yahoo! seems to have tied up with a few local players such as HolidayIQ and LastFM, whose aggregated results com up on the Glue Page quite often. There may be more partners.

I mentioned Ask up there – also have a look at FundooWeb. It was probably one of the first search engines we noticed from India to give aggregated results. So in essence there is nothing great that Yahoo! has done in terms of ‘innovation’. Credit however must be given for their UI. It seems quite intuitive in that it aggregates the right mix of results from various information providers. Eg. For a Movie Star it will give information from LastFM while for a location it will show a map and a window from Holiday IQ. While this may give a better search experience (or not?) – one has to be sceptical with respect to the objectivity of such a search engine.

Google too is providing aggregated results on its search page and they have been doing so for a while now. They probably need to learn a bit from Yahoo!’s Structuring of the UI.

I don’t think this will do wonders to Yahoo!’s Search Ranking in terms of the Indian Market or in terms of the global market. This is probably because Yahoo! isn’t really ‘positioned’ as a search engine in the consumer’s mind. It’s a full-fledged portal that gives them a lot of things. Which, they might go to sometime. Incidentally, I have seen a lot of Internet users in cyber café’s use Yahoo! for mail and they moment they want to search for something, the log on to Google – despite Yahoo! having a search engine of its own. Google, as many of you would know (better than me) succeeds because it positions itself as a search only page. And that reflects on the landing page. A user can do nothing BUT search! Google has 60% of the World’s Search Traffic and this number would be much more if you take China out of the picture where Baidu leads Google by a fair margin. Any guesses as to why?

If you noticed, Microsoft launched Live.com as an exclusive portal with only search as an option on its landing page. That’s probably something that Yahoo! should do as well if it really wants to maximize its ability to make great user interface and couple that with handy augmentations and mashups. 

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