Yahoo To Become Social Search Engine

Yahoo wants to win the battle with Google in the search engine market by using its social networks to improve the search relevancy. Yahoo wants to integrate Yahoo Answers, My Web 2.0 (that will relaunch soon), del.icio.us, Flickr into Yahoo Search. del.icio.us and My Web allow users to bookmark sites, so they can be used as a measure of site popularity. Flickr can improve the image search with high-quality pictures that have a lot of metadata (title, description, tags, comments). Yahoo Answers will be used for search queries that contain questions, the same way Google creates onebox results for queries like [Brazil population]. You type a question: [Can Flash .swf files carry viruses?] and Yahoo will find the answer in an answered questions database.

Yahoo's goal is "to change the game of search" and "tap the untapped authority" of users, said Jeff Weiner, senior vice president.

Yahoo has a stronger user base than Google. There are more people that use Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Groups than the similar products from Google and those users can tell more about the quality of a site than many complex algorithms.