Yahoo Search

History

Development of search technology

Yahoo Search began as a tool to search Yahoo! Directory, which was launched in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, then students at Stanford University. It became the first popular search engine on the Web, despite being manually curated, unlike its competitors. In 2000, Yahoo Search began licensing results from Google Search. Seeking to provide its own search engine results, in December 2002 Yahoo announced it would acquire search engine company Inktomi. The acquisition completed in March 2003.

In October 2003, Yahoo purchased Overture Services, Inc., which included the AlltheWeb and AltaVista search engines. In February 2004, Yahoo Search replaced Google's results with results from its own web crawler, Yahoo Search Technology. Yahoo Search Technology combined the capabilities of search engine companies Yahoo had acquired. The next month, the site began practicing paid inclusion to guarantee listing in search; however, most results continued to come from free web crawling.

In 2005, Yahoo Search results began including links to previous versions of pages archived on the Wayback Machine.

Evolution of search features

Yahoo released Panama, its updated sponsored search platform, in 2007. The platform introduced ad matching based on a mix of bid prices, ad quality, and relevance to the user. Also in 2007, Yahoo released OneSearch, its Internet search system for mobile phones. Yahoo used Novarra's mobile content transcoding service for OneSearch.

In October 2007, Yahoo Search added Search Assist, which provided real-time query suggestions and related concepts as queries were typed. The site also added search for audio, video, and photos. Yahoo began piloting Search Shortcuts, which highlighted key information like ratings and reviews and official sites in search results. Yahoo Shortcuts, a separate tool, launched in December 2007 as a plugin to add contextual links and freely licensed Flickr photos to content on WordPress sites quickly.

In July 2008, Yahoo Search introduced Yahoo Search BOSS ("Build your Own Search Service"). This service allows developers to use Yahoo's system for indexing information and images and create custom search engines.

Yahoo introduced Search Direct, which suggests results as the user types, in March 2011. The function aims to answer user questions without loading a new page. In 2012, the company released Yahoo Axis, a iOS app and desktop browser extension to provide a streamlined search experience. Axis displayed search results as visual snapshots in a horizontal carousel, allowing users to preview pages without leaving the results page. It was sunset in June 2013.

Yahoo published Aviate, its search application for Android devices, in June 2014. The app was updated with browser-less search six months later.

Partnerships

In July 2009, Yahoo and Microsoft announced a deal in which Bing would provide results for Yahoo Search. In exchange, the deal also established a "search alliance" between Yahoo and Bing to sell advertising on both services, with Yahoo receiving 88% of search ad sales revenue on its site for the first five years, as well as the right to sell advertisements on certain Microsoft sites. The search alliance was implemented in 2010, and all Yahoo-sponsored ad clients transitioned to Microsoft adCenter by the end of the year.

Yahoo and Microsoft modified their partnership in April 2015 to require Bing results only on the "majority" of desktop traffic, allowing Yahoo to enter into non-exclusive deals for search on mobile platforms and the remainder of desktop traffic.

In January 2020, Yahoo's parent Verizon launched OneSearch, a privacy-focused search engine. OneSearch uses Bing search results. The service selects ads based on keywords rather than HTTP cookies.

References

References

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