In an interview that strangely made headlines only in Indian tech blogs, Yahoo Research Labs’ Chief Prabhakar Raghavan declared that Yahoo will not replace its search with Bing. OK, the Yahoo-Microsoft deal is not really off, but the deal details turn out to imply that Yahoo will only use Microsoft search technology as the backend, and keep building its own smart front-end to it that will make use of Yahoo’s content assets. Raghavan says:
“Yahoo will not use Bing. Bing is a branded search engine that Microsoft is building on top of its search back-end and we will build our own search front-end on that same Microsoft back-end. It (using Bing) is not the case, at least as envisioned at the moment”
This actually makes perfect sense. Stop spending tons of resources on crawling and ranking in a futile war with Google, and focus on building the user experience over it, leveraging Yahoo’s advantage – content. Raghavan mentions scenarios that sound a lot like Yahoo shortcuts (that’s really old news) as one example of how to deliver a more complete experience over commodity search results.
The article then goes on to discuss the second focus for Yahoo, social applications, and mentions Microsoft’s tie-up with Facebook for access to social graph. Raghavan is quoted as saying:
“Social networks are not just a place to hang out, but to get things done. It predates the web.. I’m not sure where the sweet spot is, we’re still doing research on it”
Also makes perfect sense. With Google as a common enemy, and Microsoft a Facebook partner, Yahoo may be better positioned to deliver social applications that leverage the de-facto standard of Facebook graph, rather than push its own failed networks.
So why is my post title suggesting what it’s suggesting??
There is one catch in sub-contracting your search results: you are now limited with what you can do in search ranking. The best you can do is re-rank the set of results Microsoft’s technology supplied you with before presenting it to the user. As I’ve pointed out in the past when talking about Delver’s technology, social (graph-based) search is a game that cannot be played by reranking, since it’s a classic long tail problem. So when you can’t interfere with how search results are ranked, you also can’t deliver true social search, as Google recently did. One less social application Yahoo can build…
. I wrestle with that, there really ought to be more interesting stuff to blog about in the IR world, and there is also great stuff coming from Google (can you imagine the fantastic 
Clusty.com’s 
