Since Yahoo is no longer a search company, they have decided to publish papers proving that search is now a losing business. Yahoo's search model developing a new face from SFGate.com reports Yahoo released papers at the World Wide Web Conference in Raleigh, N.C. saying search is a dying technology, in other words.
Yahoo used data from their Toolbar to come up with:
It found that people only spend about one-sixth of their online time performing searches. That compares with half of their time for browsing and one-third for communicating, according to aggregated data pulled from the Yahoo Toolbar, a downloadable browser feature that provides quick links to a user's favorite content.
"By looking at the dramatic technological progress (in online search), you'd think that users would increasingly gravitate toward search to run their lives," said Prabhakar Raghavan, who was recently promoted to chief scientist at Yahoo. "But in fact, what we're seeing is that fraction of time isn't particularly growing.""That begs the question," he added, "what are the new drivers of what we traditionally thought of as search?"
Interesting, being that Yahoo says they are still focused on search - but many think otherwise.
What do you think?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
