Yahoo Brings “Glue Pages” To The US

Yahoo has announced that Glue Pages are now live in the US market. Barry wrote about Glue when it first appeared in India. Glue Pages are essentially structured search results, pulling content on particular queries or topics from a range of sources: Wikipedia, news, Yahoo Answers, image search, blogs (in some cases) and video. There are also paid search ads on the page. The sources change with the particular topic and not all topics are available, although the Yahoo Search Blog says more will be added over time.

Glue in the US has a somewhat different format than in India. Compare pages/results for “diabetes“:

However the most significant difference is that there are no general web search results on the US version of Glue. India has them in the left column. (The three column format of the Indian Glue is reminiscent of the multi-column format of Amazon’s A9.) In the US version a Yahoo search box is in the upper right of the page and, if there are no Glue results, you’re directed to try Yahoo Web Search:

Yahoo Glue is similar to what Kosmix has been doing for some time — creating aggregated or federated content pages for topics. Here’s an example of a page for Norwegian artist Edvard Munch:

Here’s the Glue equivalent:

There’s great potential value in Glue Pages for people who want a jumping off point into a topic. There’s much more efficiency in seeing all these sources collected rather than having to click around and conduct multiple searches to find them. In addition, there’s also a strong consumer shopping proposition here too, as with one of the top Glue Pages “LCD Televisions.” I’d love to see Yahoo incorporate local shopping and/or deals information into these commercial query pages (e.g., from ShopLocal). There’s obviously a great deal more than can be done with the content on these pages.

The launch format of the US Glue Pages is a bit austere for my taste — and there’s no “did you mean” functionality to catch misspellings — but it’s great to see Yahoo experiment with ways to bring more value to search and evolve it beyond “10 blue links.”

For a company that has been under fire for allegedly under-performing, Yahoo is doing some of the most interesting things of the major search engines in bringing more structure to search and innovating around the user experience.