Yahoo! Glue Visually Organizes Search Results
You might not realize this, but Yahoo quietly launched a new way to provide search results last night. This new paradigm is called Yahoo! Glue, is currently in beta in the U.S., and is based on a similar program Yahoo! has already been experimenting with in India for the last few months. If you perform a search on Yahoo! you are not going to see anything different--Yahoo! Glue currently resides on its own standalone site at glue.yahoo.com, and you'll need to perform searches specifically from Yahoo! Glue if you want to see the new search results selections and layout.
The focus of Yahoo! Glue is to offer an alternative to what has traditionally been a text-heavy-based model and to make providing search results more visually based. When search results are displayed, instead of getting a list of links with brief descriptive blurbs, Yahoo! Glue provides relevant links from specific, trusted sources and groups the search results into separate sections for news, images, videos, articles, and other related media.
Currently, the topics for which you can search for in Yahoo! Glue are limited. In a blog post, a member of the Yahoo! Glue product management team, Julie Demsey, explained: "We're starting with a limited set of topics (more will be added over time), pulling together content from the best places on the Web onto one Yahoo! Glue page." Demsey further adds: "These pages are built using an algorithm that automatically places the most relevant modules on a page, giving you a visually rich, diverse page all about the topic in which you're interested." Demsey also volunteers that Yahoo! Glue is not meant to be a replacement for Yahoo!--it is meant purely as an experiment. The implication is that those aspects of Yahoo! Glue that wind up proving truly innovative and useful might eventually make their way into the regular Yahoo! search model.
We searched for "Barack Obama" using Yahoo! Glue and were presented with a search results screen grouped into eight sections:
We were pleasantly surprised to see the inclusion of two Google sources in the search results: YouTube and Google Blog Search. It's refreshing to see when a company can look past potential competition and let serving the best needs of its users drive at least some its decisions.
We found the Yahoo! Glue results page to be well organized, easy to navigate, and included many relevant results. A search for "Barack Obama" on Yahoo! returned equally relevant results, but fewer results appeared on the first screen and the page layout was just your basic text list of relevant links with blurbs--as you would expect. It is important to note, however, that any searches you conduct on Yahoo! Glue will not provide as nearly as comprehensive search results as you would see using either Yahoo! or another search engine, such as Google. But Yahoo! Glue provides an alternative means for sifting though relevant search results without necessarily feeling bombarded with a seemingly endless list of results. Give it a try... You might like it.
The focus of Yahoo! Glue is to offer an alternative to what has traditionally been a text-heavy-based model and to make providing search results more visually based. When search results are displayed, instead of getting a list of links with brief descriptive blurbs, Yahoo! Glue provides relevant links from specific, trusted sources and groups the search results into separate sections for news, images, videos, articles, and other related media.
;) | ;) |
| Yahoo! Glue search results | Yahoo search results |
Currently, the topics for which you can search for in Yahoo! Glue are limited. In a blog post, a member of the Yahoo! Glue product management team, Julie Demsey, explained: "We're starting with a limited set of topics (more will be added over time), pulling together content from the best places on the Web onto one Yahoo! Glue page." Demsey further adds: "These pages are built using an algorithm that automatically places the most relevant modules on a page, giving you a visually rich, diverse page all about the topic in which you're interested." Demsey also volunteers that Yahoo! Glue is not meant to be a replacement for Yahoo!--it is meant purely as an experiment. The implication is that those aspects of Yahoo! Glue that wind up proving truly innovative and useful might eventually make their way into the regular Yahoo! search model.
We searched for "Barack Obama" using Yahoo! Glue and were presented with a search results screen grouped into eight sections:
- Wikipedia
- Sponsored links
- Memeorandum.com - U.S. Political News Roundup
- News
- Images
- YouTube
- Google Blog Search
- Memeorandum.com - Top Political News Sources (RSS feeds)
We were pleasantly surprised to see the inclusion of two Google sources in the search results: YouTube and Google Blog Search. It's refreshing to see when a company can look past potential competition and let serving the best needs of its users drive at least some its decisions.
We found the Yahoo! Glue results page to be well organized, easy to navigate, and included many relevant results. A search for "Barack Obama" on Yahoo! returned equally relevant results, but fewer results appeared on the first screen and the page layout was just your basic text list of relevant links with blurbs--as you would expect. It is important to note, however, that any searches you conduct on Yahoo! Glue will not provide as nearly as comprehensive search results as you would see using either Yahoo! or another search engine, such as Google. But Yahoo! Glue provides an alternative means for sifting though relevant search results without necessarily feeling bombarded with a seemingly endless list of results. Give it a try... You might like it.
