Yahoo! Is Glueing The Web Together

Yahoo! Glue is a new service being offered which might offer a glimpse of which direction web search is headed. Instead of a tall, unordered list of links like Google, Yahoo is incorporating everything (kitchen sink included) inside the search results. The service is still in beta which gives it a little more wiggle room for testing and development. The “beta” service became quite apparent when a search of “wordpress” turned up nothing. Well, the “wordpress” search did have a link included to search Yahoo!

A couple of other searches I tried out seem quite informative. The site seems to be using certain templates to categorize the types of incoming queries. When searching for geographic locations the results get broken up into various modules. Quick look up of “new york city” showed a list of other tourist destinations (Related Pages) under the header and 2 distinct columns broken up in to several modules. Recent news articles, Yahoo maps, hotel deals and flickr images are on the left column and sponsored links, Panoramio shots (professional panoramic shots) on the right column. Each of the modules have a orange flag on the bottom corner giving users the ability to “flag the results as incorrect or inappropriate”.

Running a similar query on Yahoo! Glue for “google” returned quite a different results page. The results did not have a “related searches” section and directly started off with 2 columns with 3 modules each. The left side has Yahoo News results, Wikipedia entry and Google Blog Search of the query (in this case the query was google). The right column has a stock widget showing 5 day stock performance from Yahoo Finance, some stock quotes and results from predictions by TheStreet.com

Will Yahoo! Glue be the answer to Yahoo’s prayers? With an ever decreasing stock price and unforgiving economy, it’s difficult to tell. Glue does offer an alternative to Google’s mundane search results and gives users the ability to interact and delve deeper in to what they want. But to get back some search market share from Google would take a lot more than Glue – specially in its current beta state.