Yahoo is on a roll this morning. Following on the heels of the Yahoo Buzz announcement, the company has also announced a new Search platform/API that will allow sites to inject more useful information into Yahoo Search results.
Before anyone cries foul, it's important to realize that this doesn't introduce any way of changing the ranking of a site within the search results.
Rather the very poorly named "Open Search" platform is a way for sites to create better search result information. Instead of just a headline, url and two line summary, a site can include deeper links to things like related topics, reviews, photos and more.
The example given on the Yahoo search blog is Yelp, the restaurant review site. As you can see in the screenshot above, the original listing is just the basic links while the Open Search platform allows Yelp to offer info from deeper within its site, like an image, the restaurant's phone number, price range, address and Yelp user rating. [I'm pretty sure Open Search won't anti-alias your results like in the image above and I'm not sure why Yahoo feels such an obvious PR trick is a good idea.]
Google has been experimenting with the same sort of enriched results, but thus far hasn't provided a way for site publishers to control the additional information. Ask.com also offers something similar.
What isn't clear so far is how exactly the platform works. Yahoo plans to provide more details at the SMX West conference later today. For the time being, here's how the Yahoo search blog describes the new platform:
On the surface Open Search looks like a great tool for sites like Yelp, the Times, Eventful and more to get more (and better) links into Yahoo Search results and at the same time gives Yahoo users a more compelling search engine.
But the Open Search announcement also highlights what might Yahoo's ultimate undoing - completely inept PR. Normally I would ignore the bad PR since it happens all the time, but it seems more relevant for Yahoo with a potential Microsoft merger looming on the horizon.
For instance, as Mark Hopkins points out on Mashable, the press release for both of today's announcements features an overabundance of the latest stupid buzzword - "open." I counted 23 uses in twelve paragraphs.
Both of these announcements are for services with some pretty cool new features, but neither one of them has anything to do with anyone or anything being "open," and by trying to cling to latest meaningless buzzword Yahoo manages to totally obscure the functionality of the tools they've created.
And that in turn is part of the reason why it always looks like Yahoo is struggling - the company has some great products and services, but nobody knows about them because Yahoo is always chasing the latest buzzword rather than clearly explaining what it's offering, which is a shame.
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