Yahoo's Glue is a Good Move, but the User Experience will Determine Success

Implications: Yahoo's move into Yahoo Glue is a smart concession in the basic textual search world and a desire to innovate the search experience.  Good for them.  But this is a complicated delivery in a world dominated by simple user experiences, and that is what Yahoo must concentrate on in order to succeed.

Analysis: The move by Yahoo to incorporate visual search and fully integrated search is a good one, but it presupposes much on the user experience.  As for the advertising model, in search, you need to first build a great user experience and then brand.  I believe that Yahoo India's search director is pandering when he suggests all of the interactive ad models available; if the user experience in this new delivery doesn't succeed, then all the advertising opportunities in India won't amount to a hill of Ceylon Tea.

Yahoo needs to move away from traditional search to new platforms if they really wish to turn the tide on their decreasing market share and eat into Google and then Microsoft's share.  This type of multi-product and visually integrated search is a move in that direction and, along with the recent Google search partnership, a move toward a long overdue concession that they have lost traditional search.  That is a good move.  And video and visuals are succeeding brilliantly over the Web right now.

On the other side of the coin, this combination of many products and visuals seems very confusing to me and will be hard to deliver in a worthwhile user experience.  Google succeeded because they had a great search algorithm and search content ... and because they had a phenomenal and simple user experience.  One search box in the center of the page.  The Yahoo Glue product will need a huge amount of trial and improvement to work. 

I'm not sure if it will.  But it is a good direction.

On the advertising side, Yahoo's comments cater to the analyst world who want to know how they will monitize success and traffic.  This is the least of their worries.  We all know that search will be monitized, though we are not sure exactly how that will happen in a more visual display.  Users will tell us over time.

Yahoo needs to focus on the user experience and not the ad model.