Growth and the future at Yahoo Search

Some tidbits on Search Engine Watch about Yahoo Search:

With the release of its new search engine, Yahoo now powers over half of the US web searches - this is a dramatic shift in the market share within the industry. Yahoo now has 260 million users world wide and 100 million registered users.

Yahoo sees personalized search as the future focus. The goal of personalization is to better understand the user intent. Currently, people have to type in extra words in their query to be more specific to get the results they want. With Personalized search, the search engine delivers relevant results with fewer words. For example, if people want a haircut and Yahoo knows that they live in midtown New York, Yahoo would be able to automatically supply haircutters in that area.

Yahoo's large registered user base is an advantage for personalization. Signed-in customers will not lose all their data if they lose their cookie. Signed-in users can see the same personalization from multiple computers. And many users may have provided demographic data and information about their interests.