Yahoo! launches Glue Pages in India

Read on SearchEngineLand:

Yahoo has launched Glue Pages Beta in Yahoo India. Glue Pages are specialized pages that contain an enhanced visual search result page, for select search queries. The search results that trigger the special “Glue Pages” run across searches in health, sports, entertainment, travel, technology, and finance categories. The Glue Pages combine classic search results on the left hand column with more visual information related to your query in the middle and right section of the page. The results contain images, videos, articles and more.

For instance, a search on “digital cameras” returns:

• Standard web results on the left column
• A list of popular cameras from Yahoo! Shopping US (don’t know how useful it could be for Indian users though)
• A list of blog posts from Google Blog Search (Yahoo! seems quite open regarding the data sources it uses for those Glues Pages)
• A list of auctions from eBay India
• Some articles from HowStuffWorks.com (even if the articles shown were not really accurate for this query)
• Some discussion threads from Yahoo! Answers

For me, this kind of page is far more relevant than a classic search result page when searching for topics with broad coverage. However, a challenge to build those pages is to wisely choose the data sources that are displayed: as the web search platforms (Google, Yahoo or Microsoft) are the main starting points of the web today, CSEs for instance may not find fair to have some Yahoo! Shopping placements on the search results by Yahoo!. As Yahoo! is willing to attract publishers on those Glue Pages (see the “Want your website to be on this Glue Page?” at the bottom of the page), we may imagine Yahoo! will implement smart algorithms to select the data sources:

• I.e: 3 CSEs want to be displayed on a Glue Page; the placement is considered as advertising with a pay-per-click model, each CSE paying a different CPM. Each CSE will then be exposed to a % of traffic on the Glue Pages that is related to the CPM it pays.
• This could become a better advertising channel than sponsored links.

I don’t have any insights whether this kind of algorithm will be implemented or not, not do I know whether Glue Pages will be deployed in the US or in Europe; but this new product – along with the SearchMonkey initiative – shows how Yahoo! is willing to let publishers take control of their web search results. And I think it’s a pretty clever strategy.