Stone Temple Consulting’s Eric Enge has posted the latest in a series of interviews with search luminaries. This one’s with Yahoo’s Tim Mayer, director of product management for Yahoo Search.
Mayer talks about Yahoo Search Builder, a custom vertical search tool similar to Google Co-op. He explains that the goal of Search Builder is to allow someone with a particular expertise or specialized knowledge to create a custom search engine from a subset of Yahoo’s index to yield better search results in that knowledge area. Besides that, vertical search benefits from disambiguation of certain words, and value-add for publishers.
He also tells Enge that one product strategy for Search Builder is to provide the ability for publishers to share in the monetization of the traffic, which will provide them an economic incentive.
Another gem for SEOs: “What [Search Builder] does is to evaluate your site and potentially perform a deeper crawl of your site. For example, a lot of people want to create site search. With that, you want a comprehensive search of the site. Sometimes the site is fairly well indexed. What we’re saying is if you use Search Builder, we’ll potentially include more of your documents into our index.”