“Yahoo!” Upgrades Internet Search Function

Wow! Yahoo!’s search function has changed a lot!”

Yahoo! Korea’s internet search function has been changed so much that many users praise the new performance compared to of last month. What kind of changes has been occurred in Yahoo!?

The headquarters of Yahoo! has concentrated on developing new search technologies so far. It released its brand-new technology, Yahoo! Search Technology (YST) this February in the United States. By adopting this technology, it can upgrade its search capabilities on a large scale.

In comparison with Yahoo! headquarters adopting “Google” technology in webpage searches, Yahoo! Korea has made use of its own version of web-page searching so far. Sometimes it resulted in unreasonable findings, irritating the users.

For example, when a user searches the name of Yoo Tae-pyoung-yang, a Korean traditional music prodigy, it produces more than 10,000 results, showing the lawyer of the law firm, Tae-pyoung-yang, as its first result.

An error in interpreting Korean multiple verbs occurred because it did not search the entire phrase “Yoo Tae-pyoung-yang” together, but instead divided it into two parts, “Yoo” and “Tae-pyoung-yang.”

Yahoo! Korea has asserted that the performance of YST can surpass that of “Google” and the other search engines in Korea.

The internet search engine providers are sensitive to the benchmarking data. The final result of the benchmarking test is not reachable, but anyone can judge it by carrying out a simple test. It is to compare the result of each search engine by inputting identical key words.

For example, when one searches the lyrics of “Bulnamu,” one of the famous songs of the 1970s, the search engine that shows the accurate part of the lyrics as the first result wins.

A user can check the multiple verb search function. Most people divide the words by using big quotation marks. The upgraded performance of Yahoo! Korea will appear when one compares the results.

“After the introduction of the upgraded search function, the size of the database, ranking technology, Korean language display technology, and spam site filtering technology in web-page search will improve tremendously,” remarked Choi Hyung-woo, the chief of internet search department of Yahoo! Korea.

Hye-Jin Kwon hjkwon@donga.com