Nasdaq-listed digital media company Yahoo! Inc on Wednesday launched Direct Display Builder in India. The new search service that places information directly into the search results pages, which otherwise gets displayed only after clicking for the second time.
“DD Builder currently supports 15 categories, including movies, celebrities, stocks, weather, news, shopping and locals in India. Our idea is to at least double it here, and to 200 in the US soon. You will see a larger set of rich categories to smaller ones,” Amit Dayal, vice-president (engineering, search and marketplaces group), Yahoo! said..
Dayal said Yahoo! had tied up with mobile phones maker Nokia in 2010 for introducing the latter’s digital mapping arm Navteq’s maps in the US later this year. “While Nokia will be the backend for the maps, we will be building the user experience. It’s a global strategy and if maps were to be offered in India, the partner will be Nokia,” he said, while declining to draw any time line for the India launch.
Yahoo! is also gearing up to launch Search Direct, a tool that combines content and structured data to provide a rich search experience, and Bingo Algo:Transition by the end of this year.
It recently launched Vertical Intent Search and Quick Apps, as a result of which the company’s core search activities increased 1.7 per cent from 17.9 per cent in April to 19.6 per cent in May, 2011. According to Comscore data, competitors Google and Bing have, during the same period, registered a negative growth of 0.84 and 0.74 per cent respectively.
Dayal said the company’s India research and development (R&D) facility at Bangalore would contribute significantly to search engine tools globally in the coming years.
Currently, a major chunk of its 2,000-odd R&D workforce is innovating search engine entirely from India.
“We have few areas such as multimedia tools including videos and images and few categories in vertical search, which are entirely happening from the India centre. More than 50 per cent of the vertical content search including search related to shopping content and cricket happen from India,” he said.
