This article was published on March 31, 2011

Yahoo! India to roll out Search Direct within the year


Yahoo! India to roll out Search Direct within the year

Yahoo!, the search company which recently rolled out Search Direct, is all set to release the service in India by the second half of this calendar year, said a top official of Yahoo! today.

Yahoo Search Direct is a new feature similar to Google Instant that shows search results as you type. As soon as you click inside the query window, a drop-down box appears showing the latest search trends even before typing a single character. Yahoo Search Direct has been in public beta in the U.S. for a week now, and will expand to other Yahoo products and markets later this year, the company said.

Silicon India reports that Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo!’s senior vice-president and head of Yahoo! Labs, said that Search Direct follows “a theme that the company has been pursuing ever since it forged a search alliance with Microsoft.” He mentions:

“The idea is to provide the user not with links but with answers. We expect Search Direct, a combination of completing what you were trying to type and fulfill your vertical-search intents including entertainment and shopping, which we launched in the US recently. We will be doing that in India in a few months from now.”

Yahoo! India currently employs around 2,000 professionals at its Bangalore Lab and is growing at a steady rate. India is among the few countries where Yahoo is still prominent. Alexa suggests that the search website ranks 4th in the country, with a massive reach of 30 million unique users per month and reaches to 74 percent of the Indian Internet audience.

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