Shock horror - Yahoo innovation
I was using Yahoo today (which doesn't happen very often) and I saw a couple of things they are doing in search that differentiates them from Google; things that are actually quite clever, that you would have though Google would be doing, not Yahoo. But no, Yahoo, for once, is ahead of the game.If you type in certain football clubs or football club cities into Yahoo.co.uk, you get a small info box sat the top of the listings, giving information about the club - latest club news, their league position, details of their next match, photos, plus other info. It seems to be mainly the top Premiership clubs that are covered at the moment; see the info box for Chelsea here.
The other innovation that I noticed whilst using Yahoo recently is information provided by Yahoo when you type in a major city in the UK. When typing in Oxford, for example, you get this result. Yahoo provides a useful photo slideshow of the city, plus details of top things to do in the city, and details of hotels and restaurants in Oxford that visitors might be interested in.
Both of these features utilise a concept that Google has pioneered over the last couple of years: Universal Search. Universal Search is an attempt to break up the standard search results format that has dominated the industry since its inception in the mid 1990's. Instead of just a list of 10 text results relating to the query entered, the search engines today are including photos, video, news, maps, and now sporting and travel info into the search results. Google, as is often the case, is usually acknowledged to be the industry leader in universal search, but it would seem that with the football and travel gadgets Yahoo is catching up fast.
You have to give points to Yahoo for the way that they have innovated with their search results, and managed to integrate the univerasl search elements with existing Yahoo content (Yahoo Sport and Yahoo Travel) keeping users from leaving the Yahoo universe. My guess is that Google will try to imitate these tools in its search results soon; lets see if they do it as well as Yahoo.
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