A Second Chance For Yahoo

It's rare that I get to write about Yahoo and tech innovation in the same article, but I have to admit that I am so glad to be doing it today. As an early internet user, there is a special place in my heart for Yahoo. It was one of the first innovative web companies, even though it's hard to tell these days. Yahoo has been in decline for years now, and the company has even talked of selling several times. Still, the company has hope and with their new search engine, Axis, they might just get a second chance.



When you do a web search on Google, you visit the site and type your search terms. From there, you will get a list of links to websites that relate to your search terms and you can look through them and click on the links that you think will be the most useful. It's super simple, which is why it is so popular and so difficult to compete with. However, with Axis search, (which is available as a mobile app as well) you type in their search terms and get a series of thumbnails of related websites. By scrolling through the thumbnails, you can decide which sites you want to visit.



Visual search has been tried before, but I think that this time, it might just stick. For one thing, more and more searches are being done on mobile devices and tapping on images is a bit easier than reading text on the screen. Also, as mobile screens grow larger, the thumbnail views will be able to give more information. From the thumbnail, you can see if the site is one that will be able to give you the information you want, without having to click first to find out.



Axis is still in beta testing, but is up and running for you to try out. Although Yahoo hasn't announced how they plan to monetize their search engine, odds are that they will develop a way to include ads in the visual search results. Hopefully, those ad won't be distracting or take away from the search functionality.



Time will tell how this new search from Yahoo will fare, but it's good to see that the company hasn't given up just yet.