My Prediction: Y!Q Morphs to Flavored Search

Yahoo! plans to launch a new search service today that lets you turn anything you're reading on a web page into a Yahoo! search. The service, dubbed "Y!Q,"  is located at next.yahoo.com.

Y!Q improves search quality by automatically analyzing the page and its context to the larger Internet. I think the automated approach is going to hit a wall...but if Yahoo! is serious about making this work, it's going to find an entirely new appreciative audience.

Let me explain.

If you're a city planner, a hotel or a shopping center, you're going to have a pretty strong opinion of what you want people to find in your community. (I think the relationship of publishers like IDG with Google is fairly similar.) These people are not inconsequential: their investments, and the sales tax they generate, are the economic engines that underwrite the costs of these places.

The thing that these people want to control is their own taxonomy. Taxonomy, the science of categorizing things, is another way of describing the "gatekeeper" or "walled garden" concept. Thought leaders in taxonomy include John Battelle and his Database of Intentions and former Alta Vista CTO Andrei Broder who led early efforts to describe the taxonomy of web search.

I predict that Y!Q will move away from purely automated inferences and begin working with the owners of sites to gradually develop their own customized taxonomies, which will in turn lead to a better user experience.