Posted by randfish
At last week’s SMX West conference, Yahoo! released their Open Search Platform, sharing a glimpse at how vertical and site/subject specific content might make it’s way into the Yahoo! SERPs. It’s a bit of a tough concept to explain, but it makes much more sense once you see it visually.
For example, here’s what Yahoo!’s search result for the NY Times page on Hillary Clinton looks like right now:
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And here’s what it might look like after the NYTimes sends Yahoo! more data about their pages through the Yahoo! Open Search Platform (which I’m acronymizing to YOSP from here on).
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The other visual example Yahoo! has been showing off is from Yelp.com:
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There’s a lot of questions about how a program like this might function, but rather than try to speculate, or gather information from the very small amount of data shared on the YOSP page, I figured I’d go right to the source. Luckily, Amit Kumar, the engineer from Yahoo! who presented on the product during SMX West, kindly made himself available for a brief interview over email.
First off, for those of our readers who aren’t familiar, Amit, can you tell us a little about yourself - what did you do before Yahoo!, how did you get to be there and what’s your current role?
Sure - I’ve been at Yahoo! for a couple of years, and spent time managing a few siteowner-oriented properties for Web Search, before moving over to product management. Prior to Yahoo!, I was at Verity and Inktomi.
Can you give a brief overview of Yahoo! Open Search and what the goals of the project are?
With Yahoo!’s open search platform, Yahoo! Search is the first major search engine to open its search results page to site owners and allow them to create visibly differentiated search results. Yahoo!’s open search platform will provide users more enhanced content from popular online consumer brands, and as a result, enjoy a differentiated search experience. Users will receive enhanced search results providing quicker access to what users looking for.
What are the major differences between Yahoo!’s Open Search Platform and Google’s Subscribed Links?
With the Open Search Platform, the goal is to address user needs - helping them be more productive. The entire program revolves around this philosophy, and as we share more (soon!), we hope you’ll agree that this is a program that’s easier for the publishers, interesting for developers, and useful to users. Essentially, we want all moms to like what they see - not just Dilbert’s mom. That is, more Epicurious, less IP addresses 
Will Yahoo! searchers ever see the Open Search sources by default, or is it only through subscribing to a site’s offerings that you’d see the new results?
We absolutely want to turn as many of these sources on by default as possible. Of course, as with any new program, we’ll be extremely careful to ensure only the most relevant experiences for users - so we’ll closely monitor what apps are becoming the most popular, and evaluate them for turning on to all users.
Will Yahoo! Open Search Platform be something that is submitted via an interface, or is it something that will be crawled on your site, like a robots.txt file?
Great question - we’ll have more information to share soon. As I remarked during my SMX presentation, the idea here is to allow publishers to quickly prototype something and evaluate, and scale up as they feel more confident.
The current offering appears to support "vertical" style search results, but are there other likely possibilities that you think will be compelling and interesting - any examples you can share (even if they don’t exist now)?
We feel that the infobars (ability to annotate any set of URLs) will unleash a wave of creativity. For example, I’d love to see review ratings from Yelp below restaurant results! This, and many other use cases will be enabled by the platform when we launch.
Is acceptance in the Open Search program algorithmic, editorial or both? Do you need to be accepted before Yahoo! will offer searchers the option to see your material?
Open Search Platform is open to all. The User Gallery submissions, however, will be reviewed to ensure a high-quality user experience.
Will this affect the organic search rankings? For example, might a site that has submitted content to Open Search get preferential treatment because they’re providing a richer search experience?
No, there will be no impact to the organic search rankings.
How does Open Search interact with Sponsored Search Submission from Yahoo!?
At this time, it does not interact with sponsored search submissions.
Will Open Search apply only to organic results, or will it include paid search results as well?
Right now it will only apply to organic results.
How long before you expect the program to be live and operational? For those who are very interested, where can we keep up with progress updates?
We’ll be live later this year - and if you’re interested in getting more information, you can sign up at http://tools.search.yahoo.com/open and we’ll contact you.
What were some of the best/most interesting pieces of feedback you’ve received about Open Search?
We are really excited about the positive reception we’ve received so far - people really do get why this is a more productive experience for users. We hope to have more details on the program for you soon.
And now for some of my personal thoughts about this product from Yahoo!:
- This is a pretty big leap in functionality, but as Matt Cutts noted (although, c’mon Matt, you totally could have waited a week to publish and let Yahoo! have a quick moment in the sun), Google’s been offering subscribed links for a while, though they were never intended to show by default, which is the big difference with Yahoo!
- The Yelp & NYTimes results look (and would appear to work) great in the screenshots, but translating this product to the longer tail queries seems like it would present a significant engineering challenge.
- If Yahoo! can encourage a lot of big publishers to contribute and if searchers love these results, I think it will become hard not to bias the results in favor of those who’ve contributed high quality YOSP feeds.
- Also - if this has some success, I fully expect Google (and probably Live, as well) to jump on board and start YOSP-like programs of their own.
- This strategy - of letting the content creators - the "partners" of the search engines, in essence, create the data that they think their users will want is a really, really good idea. The search engines may know what some people want, but publishers know what their readers and their searchers want, so outsourcing the work to them (especially when they’re happy to build it for free) seems like a damn good move.
- One big fear - does this create a more closed web? If site owners are contributing content through submission directly to the engines, rather than making it crawlable on their sites, do new or emerging engines stand any chance at all?
I suspect the folks from Yahoo! will be reading the comments, so please feel free to give ideas, suggestions and opinions about the product. It’s not entirely game-changing, but it’s certainly another step towards Danny’s Search 4.0 (whatever that is!) 
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I am back from SXSW in Austin, TX and somehow I am still alive. I have no idea what really happened in search this week because I’ve been so immersed in the southwest, but thankfully Search Engine Roundtable is keeping me up to speed. 
