In a bid to take on Google, Yahoo! is all set to unveil its latest search engine “Search Direct” in India by the second half of 2011, said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategy officer, executive vice-president and head of Yahoo! Labs-India.
Yahoo! has already rolled out the beta version of Search Direct in the US last week. The search engine predicts results character by character, and presents those results dynamically, generating a fast, simple search experience.
“So, what if we didn’t give the user lots of blue links but distill the information that people use and put that upfront,” he told mediapersons in Hyderabad on Wednesday.
Yahoo!, which reaches 30 million users per month in India and 74 per cent of the Indian Web audience, currently employs around 2,000 professional at its Bangalore Lab, its second largest research and development (R&D) centre after its headquarters in the US.
The Bangalore research arm, called Yahoo! Labs, focuses on basic and applied research in the areas of next-generation search, advertising and large-scale computing systems.
