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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