Google may dominate the Internet search market today, but the battle for control of this crucial sector is just getting started, a Yahoo executive said Wednesday.“We’re three steps into a marathon,” said Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo’s vice president of product strategy, in an interview at the CommunicAsia exhibition in Singapore.Google was the top U.S. search engine in May, based on the latest figures from Nielsen//NetRatings. It handled 49 percent of Internet searches, and saw the number of searches conducted on its site increase by 32 percent from the same period last year.But Yahoo and Microsoft are gaining ground, Nielsen//NetRatings said. Yahoo handled 23 percent of searches in May, answering 34 percent more queries than it did last year. Microsoft’s MSN Search was third, handling 11 percent of Internet searches in May. MSN gained the most ground, however, increasing the number of queries it processed by 42 percent. Determining which company dominates Internet search in the future will depend on pushing the limits of search technology. The search engine that returns the best results will help determine who comes out on top.Current search technology is largely based on a method that Google pioneered of ranking webpages. This method examines links between different sites to determine which are the most relevant to a search query. “We’ll never know enough about the page looking at it in isolation to do relevance and ranking. You’ve got to step back and look at the link structure, who’s linking to who,” Horowitz said. While this approach will remain important, it will take search technology only so far. “We’ve been stuck in that phase as an industry for seven or eight years,” Horowitz said.Future advances in search technology must handle subjective queries, such as where to eat or what to buy, Horowitz said. Yahoo calls these “transactional queries,” versus the “navigational queries” that take users one from one website to another. The company is betting on social search, a technique that draws on users’ input, to provide results for transactional queries.This is an area of strength for Yahoo, which has signed up millions of registered users through its various offerings, including Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger, photo-sharing site Flickr, and social-bookmarking site Del.icio.us. The company hopes to draw on these users, and their networks of trusted contacts, to provide answers to subjective queries.“Anything that requires human expertise, where you would value the opinion of your neighbor, your friend, your mentor, people you trust in different contexts—that’s the real opportunity,” Horowitz said.Because many of these queries are centered on purchases, they will be a lucrative source of advertising revenue. “They are the most valuable kind of queries,” he said.CommunicAsia runs through Friday. -Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service (Beijing Bureau)Check out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage. Related content brandpost The steep cost of a poor data management strategy Without a data management strategy, organizations stall digital progress, often putting their business trajectory at risk. Here’s how to move forward. By Jay Limbasiya, Global AI, Analytics, & Data Management Business Development, Unstructured Data Solutions, Dell Technologies Jun 09, 2023 6 mins Data Management feature How Capital One delivers data governance at scale With hundreds of petabytes of data in operation, the bank has adopted a hybrid model and a ‘sloped governance’ framework to ensure its lines of business get the data they need in real-time. By Thor Olavsrud Jun 09, 2023 6 mins Data Governance Data Management feature Assessing the business risk of AI bias The lengths to which AI can be biased are still being understood. The potential damage is, therefore, a big priority as companies increasingly use various AI tools for decision-making. By Karin Lindstrom Jun 09, 2023 4 mins CIO Artificial Intelligence IT Leadership brandpost Rebalancing through Recalibration: CIOs Operationalizing Pandemic-era Innovation By Kamal Nath, CEO, Sify Technologies Jun 08, 2023 6 mins CIO Digital Transformation Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe