Originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle April 29, 2010 by James Temple Yahoo Inc. stresses that it's still in the online search business, but a series of papers and presentations the company is unveiling at a major conference this week underscore how navigating the Web has less to do with the search box and blue links we know so well. Instead, Internet surfers are increasingly relying on social networks, location-aware smart phone applications and voice or images to steer them to the content they find most relevant and engaging. The direction of Yahoo's research and business model, as well as broader sector trends, are starting to reflect this changing reality. Last year, Yahoo moved to outsource its core search engine technology to Microsoft Corp. Last month, social networking king Facebook nudged past search giant Google Inc. in site visits, according to research firm Hitwise. Meanwhile, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have all struck search partnerships with micro-blogging service Twitter, and invested in or launched their own social networking ventures. Supplemental tools So far at least, these new means of navigation are supplementing rather than displacing search, said Carl Howe, analyst with the Yankee Group Research Inc. Indeed, the search companies themselves are providing the technological engines for many of the new tools, notably those on mobile devices. "I don't think search has anything to worry about yet," he said. "The trend is increasing, but it's still largely a search world." Less time searching Yet, one study Yahoo Labs is releasing at the World Wide Web Conference in Raleigh, N.C. - the details of which were provided to The Chronicle in advance - underscores why the sector can't afford to stand still. It found that people only spend about one-sixth of their online time performing searches. That compares with half of their time for browsing and one-third for communicating, according to aggregated data pulled from the Yahoo Toolbar, a downloadable browser feature that provides quick links to a user's favorite content. Separate data from the Online Publishers Association and Nielsen Online show even wider disparities between these categories. As Yahoo's paper notes, this means the thing that generates the most money online - search ads - is the thing people spend the least amount of time focused on, at least among the categories analyzed. "By looking at the dramatic technological progress (in online search), you'd think that users would increasingly gravitate toward search to run their lives," said Prabhakar Raghavan, who was recently promoted to chief scientist at Yahoo. "But in fact, what we're seeing is that fraction of time isn't particularly growing." "That begs the question," he added, "what are the new drivers of what we traditionally thought of as search?" Additional papers to be released by the Sunnyvale portal attempt to answer this question in various ways. Two analyze data from real-time social media services like Twitter, in an effort to better understand up-to-the-second topics of interest, the way users interact during major world events and how people feel about what's unfolding. Another study looks at the use of images to refine search results. Read more at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/29/BU391D5IGE.DTL#ixzz0mVToQrDB

More information at:

SF Chronicle