Yahoo! Glue Mimics Ask Universal Search

May 12th, 2008

Yahoo! India has launched a new feature last week known as ‘Glue’ pages. They are special pages with attached visual inputs alongside the regular search results, that show up for specific types of searches.

Yahoo! has chosen India to beta test this new search feature as India is a very fast growing market. If user reaction to the feature is positive, they will offer this feature in other countries as well. To start with, Glue pages will cover the travel, sports, health, technology, finance and entertainment verticals - topics that will have a large amount of information and several sources.

Glue pages are expected to improve the over all user experience. Mr. Gopal Krishna, Head of Audience at Yahoo! India says, “this concept integrates the best of info in a visually appealing manner.”

The new search results page format is very similar to the search results found on Ask 3D. However, they differ substantially from the Google universal search results page, in that, here the information is be put up in the form of separate columns. The layout of the columns varies from topic to topic. Even the placement of sponsored links seems to be varied across searches.

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Comparison of Yahoo! Glue pages and Ask 3D results

Search results will now be inclusive of news, videos, music, images, Wikipedia articles and information from other sources. Users can browse through videos, articles and images on a given topic within the same page without needing to click through to visit multiple pages. The time wasted in the actual search process will now be considerably reduced.

Glue pages seem to be indiscriminately “open” in their choice of sources. Content is drawn from sites such as Last.FM, Wikipedia, HowStuffWorks.com and even YouTube, which is owned by their main competitor, Google!

Users who are not satisfied with the Glue pages can switch to the old format by simply clicking on the “classical search” tab. Yahoo! Has obviously put in some time and effort to offer a lot of good information in user friendly manner on their search results page. It is a shame though, that Ask beat them to the punch by a long time, and the improved layout did nothing to help improve Ask’s marketshare. History is not on Yahoo!’s side in this case, even if they are pinning their hopes on attracting and retaining more searchers through this improved search format.