Algorithms are in the news this week and as far as that goes, this year.
In a surprising change, Yahoo and Bing are partnering up to take on Google.
Bing, to those who remember, used to be called “Live Search” and as part of the new deal is now going to power Yahoo searches.
Yahoo and Microsoft have been conspiring to take more of the market that Google has seemingly dominated in recent memory.
This new partner ship between the two search engines, is projected to capture 31 percent of the market share, while Google maintains an approximate 85 percent share.
Despite this change in services, Yahoo insists that search functionality will not change.
For example, webmasters will still be able to use the “Build your Own Search Service”, Yahoo! Query Language, and Site Explorer.
In a less popular change, developers will now have to pay for utilizing the tools which used to be for free.
This deal only covers the search results portion of Yahoo services; other services will not be affected by the change except one; The only real casualty will be Yahoo SearchMonkey.
The Search Monkey service will shut down on October 1st and any associated third party custom result applications, infobar applications, and data services will also be affected.
What does this mean to the end user? You have a little over a month to say goodbye to the monkey.
The final breakdown of the Yahoo-Microsoft agreement will go as follows: back-end crawling, listing, and ranking technologies that generate search results will be handled by Microsoft. Presentation of the results, save a “Powered by Bing” message at the bottom of the results page, will be handled by Yahoo.
Visually, it should improve searching.
Not to sit back and watch this happen, Google recently acquired Like.com, a visual search engine website for a rumored $100 million.
The idea it appears is to enhance Google’s initiatives towards visual searching.
Like.com’s searching technology, when added to the Google line up, has the real possibility of transforming online shopping to resemble more social media than e commerce.
Theorized changes include; ability to upload personalized photos with the intent to allow a search engine to virtually try on clothing and pre-fit and pre-try on color and style combinations for the best possible outcome.
This is not new technology per-SE, as Like.com made its debut in 2004 as Riya.
Its attraction is the algorithms that were developed to search for things like bags, clothes, shoes, and jewelry.
Essentially it can understand what “red shoes” and “black skirts” look like, and the algorithm cross-matches items to uncover the right combination for the desired look.
As the Yahoo modification is slated to take as long as until 2012 to complete, Google is looking to implement its changes in a more timely manner, so we may see an easier online shopping Christmas season.
One thing these changes have in common, is that visual elements in our searching have become more desirable than text based functionality, and this will prove more and more challenging to enforce going forward.
To me, this highlights the need for professional enforcement and monitoring and just reinforces what many of us already know; the only constant on the Internet is change.
