Announcing the changes on Thursday, Yahoo’s Andrew Poon wrote in a Tumblr post, “We know when you’re on the go, you’re often searching for a specific piece of information. Rather than delivering endless links for you to sift through on a small screen, we beautifully assemble the most relevant information in a way that allows you to take action right away.”
The new algorithms have already gone into effect for U.S.-based folks using Yahoo search on a mobile browser, for example Safari, Chrome, or Opera.
In his post, Poon said people’s shift to mobile search is having a profound effect on the overall search experience, a development that has allowed the Web company “to use rich inputs like context and location in order to deliver the most relevant results.”
Google, too, has recently been focusing on ways to improve mobile search, ranking sites higher in returned results if they’ve been optimized for mobile.
While the move has hit businesses that haven’t gotten around to making their websites mobile friendly, Google is confident smartphone users will be much happier landing on a mobile-optimized site rather than having to fumble about on one designed for desktop.
In a bid to score more mobile traffic, Poon suggests users set Yahoo as their default search engine on their mobile browser. It’s not hard to see what motivated Poon’s prompt – recent data from StatCounter suggests Google is way, way ahead in mobile search with nearly 93 percent of the global market. Sure, Yahoo has the second spot, but with a meagre 3.2 percent of the market, the company clearly has plenty of work to do to get back in the game.
