Yahoo! India R&D launched a brand new avatar of their search today at the Web Innovation Summit'08, codenamed 'Glue'. Kicked off only in India as a test market, it combines traditional search with visual and relevant data from the web collated from multiple sources in a very intuitive manner.
Intuitive because it has smart algorithms which figure out what you're looking for - so if you search for 'Sachin Tendulkar', you are thrown up his player profile from Cricinfo, stats etc. Search for 'Maldives' and you'll see photos from the honeymoon destination, a map and other relevant data. Similarly, an entry for 'Infosys' gives you stock quotes, company info and such. Very clever.
Wikipedia and recently Mahalo have been doing pretty much the same, but both have a different model which follow more of a wiki model with human editors around the world. Yahoo! India Search 'Glue' takes a different route in that, it mashes up data from various web sources and serves it up on the fly.
I spoke to Tejasvi, a Yahoo! employee at the booth and asked him a couple of questions.
The most interesting thing he told me was that they will be opening up the modules to third parties, so you can add/remove custom modules. I'll wait for that - sure sounds like a great way to search and surely a step in the right direction!
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