No one can dispute that Google is still miles ahead of the rest of the field but Yahoo! have this year reported a 34% rise in the number of search queries they've received compared to the same results from last year. And even though these are impressive figures for Yahoo the vice president of product strategy Bradley Horowitz said that their race had just begun, and that they were "three steps into a marathon."
Yahoo claims that "transactional queries" are the way forward for search. Transactional queries are those where the user is searching for the best place to eat or the best place to buy something - essentially those terms where the user is looking to convert. Yahoo! seems to be hinging its efforts on social search to provide results for these "transactional queries".
With services such as photo-sharing site Flickr, and social-bookmarking site Del.icio.us backing them - unsurprisingly, since Yahoo! owns both services - Yahoo! are arguably the top of the field of social search. Social search is a good way of finding out what actual humans want to see, and what real people recommend, therefore if the second leg of the 'total search experience' marathon is indeed to be social search then Google may soon find Yahoo! hot on its heals.
It's encouraging to hear that although it is hard to keep up with the search engine giant Google, their closest competitor Yahoo! hasn't given up, and that therefore there is still a long way to go before we are faced with an overall search supremacy. After all, choice is good - it drives quality and competitive pricing and is always good for the consumer. As impartial users we want our search results to be the best results possible and the best way of maintaining that is if the search engine companies are kept on their toes and have some healthy competition from other big web companies.
It's a competitive marketplace and long may it last!
