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Yahoo Sees Social Search As Competitive Edge

Social search--widely considered to be the push toward enhancing search tools by analyzing the data and behaviors of its users--"is the linchpin of Yahoo's strategy to compete with rival Google," says Reuters. The company is investing heavily in the research and development of a social search application. It has already committed to acquiring new startups that should help achieve its goal. Sites like Flickr, Del.icio.us, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo Groups and Yahoo Mail provide a "unique opportunity to integrate conventional search," says Raghu Ramakrishnan, Yahoo's new chief strategist of social search. The result will be a fusion of human-aided data mixed with computer-generated data. "How do you make all of this [search activity] as natural as possible to users?" That's the chief question Ramakrishnan will study, since there is "a big gap between the two subjects," he says. Yahoo and rival Google also take different approaches to the future of search. Google's is driven by computer-generated data from a massive index of Web pages that are linked together. Google has integrated user data into results, but never its collective user-data.

Read the whole story at Reuters.com »

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