Yahoo to offer structured Web search from Macworld reports Yahoo is going to launch a new structured search component to their web search engine.

Web search is typically considered “unstructured,” where there isn’t a real method of comparing sets of results side by side, in a data comparison grid structure. Yahoo hopes to offer structured search for certain types of queries to help aid the searcher in their information retrieval process.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Yahoo’s vice president of research for Europe and Latin America, said they will likely start offering structure search for e-commerce sites and similar online applications. Baeza-Yates would not give a date for the launch, but he did tell Macworld that “it could happen fast.”

You can already see forms on structured search on search engines like Ask.com and Google.

For example, a search at Ask.com for ipods returns structured data from Ask.com Shopping.

An other example is a search at Google for rent apartment in manchester, which shows drop downs in the search results, enabling you to better fine tune your search through Google Base (a form of structured search).

Yahoo also has elements of structured search; for example, a search on Tom Brady returns results from Yahoo Sports.

Related Topics: Yahoo: Search

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz