Yahoo! India rolls out Direct Display Builder, Search Direct coming later this year

Yahoo! India has rolled-out a service called “Direct Display Builder” to its Indian portal Yahoo.co.in, integrating content such as stock prices, weather and movies directly into the search results. This is similar to how search results are currently displayed on its global search engine Yahoo.com, plus some other country-specific versions.

This means, for example, if you enter YHOO (Yahoo’s ticker symbol) in the search engine, you will see Yahoo’s current stock price along with the day’s stock chart, as is the case on Yahoo! UK:

Amit Dayal, Yahoo’s VP, engineering, search and marketplaces group said:

“DD Builder currently supports 15 categories, including movies, celebrities, stocks, weather, news, shopping and locals in India. Our idea is to at least double it here, and to 200 in the US soon. You will see a larger set of rich categories to smaller ones.”

Furthermore, he added that its Bangalore based research and development facility which currently houses over 2,000 people, would contribute more significantly to Yahoo’s global search engine in the coming years. He said:

“We have few areas such as multimedia tools including videos and images and few categories in vertical search, which are entirely happening from the India center. More than 50 per cent of the vertical content search, including search related to shopping content and cricket, happen from India.”

That aside, Yahoo! India confirmed that it will be rolling out Search Direct, a feature which was first announced in March 2011 with an intention of providing a Google Instant-esque experience to users by the end of this year. Also, Yahoo.co.in will start the transition to the Bing Algorithm by Q3 this year.