Yahoo is going to be aggressively improving its search results in an effort to improve performance against rivals like Google. That’s one of the things Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made clear in going over fourth-quarter earnings in a call with analysts Monday.
On the call, Yahoo search was one of three parts of the company Mayer called out as in most urgent need of an overhaul, along with Yahoo Mail and the Yahoo.com homepage. A reinvigorated Yahoo search engine could mount a serious challenge to by far the most lucrative business at Google, where Mayer once headed its search product, and even restore Yahoo's long-lost position as the best place to find something on the internet.
“Overall in search, it’s a key area of investment for us,” Mayer said. “We need to invest in a lot of interface improvements. All of the innovations in search are going to happen at the user interface level moving forward and we need to invest in those features both on the desktop and on mobile and I think both ultimately will be key plays for us.”
“We have a big investment we want to make and a big push on search. We have lost some share in recent years and we’d like to regain some of that share and we have some ideas as to how.”
Yahoo's search engine has languished since it was eclipsed by Google and Google's groundbreaking search results ranking system, PageRank, in the early 2000s. Yahoo eventually outsourced its own search infrastructure to Microsoft's Bing, a partnership Mayer continues to praise, at least for now. Yahoo, presumably, can improve its search engine by simply wrapping Microsoft's search infrastructure in an improved user interface.
Mayer clearly hopes the scales will tip again, as they did in the 1990s, but this time away from Google. Yahoo might be able to find a new edge in a world where more and more searches are conducted from mobile phones and tablets; Mayer noted on the earnings call that Yahoo helps power searches on the Siri digital assistant included with Apple iPhones and iPads. Whether Yahoo’s place in the future goes much beyond that will hinge on Mayer’s ability to deliver on her “big investment.”
