Yahoo Says It Has Its Own Algorithm For Mobile Search Results

Yesterday, in Yahoo’s earnings call, in the question and answer portion, the CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer said that Yahoo runs their own algorithm for their mobile search results.

The transcript has Marissa Mayer saying they have their own “algorithmic search on mobile.” The context was around showing “rich card experiences” and adding that experience into their mobile search results. Mayer added, “the organic results on mobile with our own technology that we think provides a richer, more action-oriented set of experiences on mobile.”

This was to introduce that they want to power their own ads to match their own search experience on mobile through the Gemini platform.

Yahoo has been powering their own knowledge graph for some time as well. That data may be licenses or crawled through algorithms they’ve built over the years.

Webmasters have continued to see Yahoo Slurp, the Yahoo search crawler/bot, continue to crawl through web sites. That frequency of the Yahoo crawl has slowed ever since Yahoo stopped powering their own search results. But Yahoo has never completely stopped crawling the web. Which often signaled that Yahoo was crawling the web to show something unique in their search results.

Here is the full snippet of what Marissa Mayer said around their own search algorithm:

And in terms of mobile search, overall we really want to think about what enhances the user experience. We’ve been really excited to be introducing rich card experiences into our algorithmic search on mobile. And in fact, today, we actually power more than half of our experiences or our searches, our search results, the organic results on mobile with our own technology that we think provides a richer, more action-oriented set of experiences on mobile. We want the ads to match that. We really ultimately want that experience. One of the things that’s great about search ads is a lot of times they actually improve the search experience and provide you with a better result. So we want to figure out through the Gemini platform how to make the ads equally actionable, perhaps oriented towards applications and/or deep linking, et cetera. And by having our own platform, it really allows us the opportunity to experiment.

Postscript: Yahoo has sent us more details on this topic.

They told us that Google will only start powering some of Yahoo’s search results after voluntary regulatory review
by the Department of Justice. Yahoo also powers more than half of the Yahoo search experiences or searches, search results, the organic results on mobile with their own technology that they think provides a richer, more action-oriented set of experiences on mobile.

On the topic of Yahoo’s crawler, Yahoo told us “Yahoo believes deeply in search – an area of growth and continued investment for
us. We’ve been crawling the web for more than a decade, and continue to invest as we grow our own technology with a focus on
mobile.”

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

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 SEM topics.