“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…

Contrast this with Microsoft’s poor attempt at “social search” by indexing tweets and status messages and showing them regardless of the actual searcher (example search, you’ve got to be on “United States” locale on bing to see it).

Then also contrast it with Facebook’s announcement back in August of its implementation of searching within friends’ posts - a less grandiose announcement that yet delivered far more social experience than Bing’s. Nevertheless, it’s a very limited experience and far from being a true information source for any serious search need.

So how does Google overcome the main obstacle – collecting your connections?

Google relies on its own sources and on open sources it can obtain by crawling the social graph. That is the true reason why Facebook is not part of Google’s graph (no XFN/FOAF marking on Facebook’s public pages). Google may be counting on Facebook’s inevitable opening up, and with Gmail’s rising popularity it becomes a reasonable alternative even for Facebook users like me.

Sadly, all this great news gave zero credit to Delver, where it all happened first…

No, not Kumo. That’s Google’s recent launch, trying to compete with Twitter search (“Recent results”), to preempt Microsoft (clustering result types), to show a different, though quite ugly UI metaphor (“wonder wheel”), and generally to roll out a whole bunch of features that should have been Google Labs features before making (or not) their way into a public product. So what’s next? buttons next to search results moving them up or down with no opt-out?? Ah, wait, that waste of real estate is already there.

Someone is panicking. OPEN FIRE! ALL WEAPONS!!! DISPATCH WAR ROCKET AJAX!!! The same spirit that brought us the failure of knols, is bringing us yet further unnecessary novelty, but this time it’s a cacophony of features, each deserving a long Google Labs quarantine by itself.

I noticed that much of my recent blog posts have to do with Google criticism . 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 similar images feature is still in labs? can Google please apply this to the ridiculously useless “similar pages” link in main web search results??), but I truly think we see a trend. Google is dropping the ball, losing the clear and spotless logic we have seen in the past, and the sensible slow graduation of disruptive features from Google Labs. Sadly, though, it’s not clear if anyone is there, ready to pick that ball…

As usual, the immediate reaction is – regardless of the actual change, how feasible is it to assume you could make users switch from their Google habit? but let’s try to put that aside and do look at the actual change.

Search results are grouped into clusters based on the aspects of this particular search query. This idea is far from being new, and was attempted in the past by both Vivisimo (at Clusty.com) and by Ask.com. One difference, though, is that Microsoft pushes the aspects further into the experience, by showing a long page of results with several top results from each aspect (similar to Google’s push with spelling mistakes).

At least judging by the (possibly engineered) sample results, the clustering works better than previous attempts. Most search engines take the “related queries” twist on this, while Kumo includes related queries as a separate widget:

Clusty.com’s  resulting clusters, on the other hand, are far from useful for a serious searcher with enquire/purchase intent.

At least based on these screenshots, it seems like Microsoft succeeded in distilling interesting aspects better, while maintaining useful labels (e.g. “reviews”). Of course, it’s possible this is all done as a “toy”, limited example, e.g. using some predefined ontology. But together with other efforts, such as the “Cashback” push and the excellent product search (including reviews aggregation and sentiment analysis), it seems like Microsoft may be in the process of  positioning Live as the search engine for ecommerce. Surely a good niche to be in…