Yahoo! announces structured search plans

27th November 2007

Internet company Yahoo! is to offer users a new way of searching the web, according to new reports.

PC Advisor claims users will be offered a structured search where a number of options will be available after they type in their initial query.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Yahoo!'s vice president of research for Europe and Latin America, gave the example that when looking for the term mobile phone, the site will offer a number of drop-down menus including brands, technologies and specifications.

He also told the magazine that the company aims to own datacentres on a global scale, so that queries can be handled locally.

"The problem which we are trying to solve is to make the search for global queries also fast, as the latency of the network is the main problem," he said.

Data measurement company comScore revealed that Yahoo! powered 22.9 per cent of the total searches in the US during October of this year, a decrease of 0.8 per cent on the previous month.