Search Engine Optimisation Web Log (BLOG)
Editor: Matt Paines

| This News Blog is dedicated to bringing news, information and innovations targeting the Search Engine Optimisation industry.

Yahoo! to add style to results

Yahoo! is to enhance its search engine to allow website owners to style how their sites appear in its results. The former search directory is to introduce a new open source application interface, code-named Search Monkey, which will utilise its Machine Learned Ranking technology to enable website publishers to tailor the appearance of their result entries with additional information.
 
Website owners will be able to supply Yahoo! with supplementary data such as photos, links, addresses, phone numbers or related stories that they want to show against their result entries.
 
However, the new system will not allow publishers to directly control the ranking of search results themselves.
 
The move will nevertheless have implications for internet marketing strategies as the extra information a Yahoo! entry will carry is likely to influence visitor numbers.
 
Senior vice-president and general manager of Yahoo Search, Vish Makhijani, said that they would be presenting users with richer, more useful search results so that they could complete their tasks more efficiently.
 
So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, he added, for the first time users would see rich results that incorporated the massive amount of data buried in websites.
 
Google is working on a similar initiative, Subscribed Links, which will also provide users with customisable search results.

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