Mixed Media And Search, As Explained By Yahoo

More and more, search isn’t just a matter of lots of text and ten blue links. Mixed media – think pictures and video – is a big deal. And an important Yahoo executive recently explained how this affects search from the perspective of his company, search engine users, and publishers.

Larry Cornett, Vice President of Product Management and Design for Yahoo Search, said in an interview with Abby Johnson that Yahoo is attempting to create a “personally relevant search experience” for people. The company wants to provide a comprehensive amount of information so that individuals can always find what they’re looking for.

To this end, Yahoo’s introduced a universal header that helps determine users’ intent. It can help direct someone who’s searching for a football player to Yahoo Sports, for example.

Of course, this approach means that publishers should take more than text search results into account. According to Cornett, they need to pay attention to how their brand is portrayed in image and video search results, and on Twitter, too.

Cornett then boiled the matter down to a fairly simple question publishers should ask themselves: “Am I really being represented the way I want to be in every one of these search experiences?”