Yahoo Inc. is pruning Web links from its Internet search results as it strives to provide more immediate gratification and lure traffic away from the market leader, Google Inc.
The Sunnyvale, California-based company previewed some of the upcoming improvements Tuesday as it updated reporters and bloggers on its two-year effort to gain a better understanding of what users really want when they make certain requests.
It’s a challenging mission because the same search request can mean different things for different people. For instance, one person entering “Paris Hilton” may be looking for the latest dirt about the rollicking socialite, while another may simply want to make hotel reservations for an upcoming trip to France.
Yahoo thinks it is doing a better job, largely because it is able to track the search patterns and interests derived from requests made on the same computer.
The same kind of surveillance is helping to improve the results at Yahoo’s primary competition in the lucrative search market, Google and Microsoft Corp.
Yahoo is hoping it can differentiate itself from its rivals by packaging its results so just about everything users want is on the first page of listings.
As part of that process, Yahoo has been phasing out the blue links that have traditionally filled up search result pages. In their place, Yahoo is showing more capsules of vital information that include images, video and even sound bites.
“We need to move away from a Web of pages to a Web of objects,” said Prabhakar Ragahavan, who oversees Yahoo’s search strategy.
Some of Yahoo’s upgrades were made months ago and are probably already familiar to the search engine’s millions of loyal users.
For instance, searches for restaurants already include the address, phone number and maps on the main search page while requests about baseball players return their current statistics. Searches of singers often feature…