Users of Yahoo Search may soon be able to do a structured search around select terms, rather than navigate through a large number of search results. The company plans to offer a new structured search to make the Web easier to navigate. If a user enters the words “mobile phone” in the search box, for example, apart from throwing up the usual search results containing the phrase “mobile phone,” Yahoo’s new structured search will also offer pull-down menus with choices including mobile phone brands, technologies and specifications, and other features, said Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Yahoo’s vice president of research for Europe and Latin America, in an interview. The feature is primarily suitable for e-commerce applications such as online shopping, he said. Once the user has made a selection on the menus, Yahoo Search will give the user a list of mobile phones meeting the specifications, their prices, and the Web sites where they can be purchased. Baeza-Yates did not say when the feature would be available on Yahoo Search, but indicated it could happen fast. The structured search feature is one of many technologies that Yahoo plans to introduce to help differentiate its search from that of competitors such as Google and Microsoft. The company is also working on a new distributed search architecture designed to make local search a lot faster, according to Baeza-Yates. The plan is to have a network of datacenters in many countries so that local queries are handled more quickly at the local datacenter, he said.http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/11/27/yahoo/index.php?lsrc=mwrss
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