Yahoo! New Open Search

Will they get it right this time? Seriously, will they? The “Same Old Song and Dance” is starting within the Yahoo! camps as the “new” Yahoo! Search will soon rollout.

I’m not being a pessimist here, seriously, it is almost as if we are turning the clock back when Yahoo! acquired Inktomi and said they were going to revamp it and would take the market by storm.

We’re still waiting.

Over at the Yahoo! Blog they are touting the use of microformats. What are microformats? Without going through a lengthy explaination they are just a way to format chunks of information … for example, embedding LinkedIn info into a webpage.

Maybe I am missing the boat here, but it seems clear that what Yahoo! is doing here is adding gadgets to an AMC Pacer. Sure the gadgets are cool, but the car still sucks. So what good is it? Comeon already, quit dumping a billion dollars into stuff like Alibaba and actually fix Inktomi. Correct me if I’m wrong, but they haven’t done squat to Ink since acquiring it over five years ago.

This is just one more reason why the current execs of Yahoo! (even the new ones) just don’t get what search really needs. Just kill Ink if you aren’t going to fix it and go to a complete PPC model with secondary results from your directory.

Give the user something useful for a change.