Should Yahoo! Go Social?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 20 of January , 2008 at 6:57 am

Early bird Aaron Wall started the day telling Yahoo! how to run its business. He actually made some pretty suggestions on ways that Yahoo! can improve its brand and take back some of that market share it has lost to Google over the years. But one point stood out to me - in fact, it stepped up and kicked me right between the legs.

Let users comment on search results AND on listings in search results. Controversy surrounding this will lead to more people talking about and evaluating Yahoo! Search for quality.

I can’t help but think what an explosive buzz that would create to allow searchers to comment on search results. There have already been search engines, or aggregators, that allow people to vote on results. Aftervote comes to mind. I wonder if that is where Aaron Wall got his idea from?

Anyway, while Yahoo! wouldn’t be the first search engine to implement commenting on search (Aftervote also includes this feature), they would be the first major search engine to have that feature should they implement it. I doubt that they will. Yahoo! has never been an innovator. They have always been a market follower, even in the days when they told Google founders that they search technology wasn’t good enough for Yahoo! That proved to be the biggest mistake in search history.

I liked Yahoo! as a directory. These days it’s hard to tell they even own a directory. It isn’t all that prominent. But neither is their search feature, which is prominent in the usual sense of the word, but it isn’t prominent in practice - and that’s what matters.

If any of the major search engines actually went social - I mean, really social - then it would be all over. Social media is where the game is at right now. Nearly all of the top sites online these days are some kind of social media. All a search engine would need to do is add a comments feature and a voting system to their search results and all the others would, by the rules of survival, have to follow. But will it be Yahoo!? I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Category: Search Engines, Social & Viral Marketing

• Add this post to Del.icio.us - Digg

No comments yet.