ReadWriteWeb

One year ago, Yahoo announced that it had signed a deal to replace its own search engine with Microsoft's Bing - but the big question for us was what that meant for all the incredible search-related programming infrastructure Yahoo makes available to outside developers. Today Yahoo began offering the beginning of an answer to that question.

In a post on the Yahoo Developer Network blog, VP Social Platforms at Yahoo Neal Sample broke the news.

The search engine market is obviously dominated by a small number of big players, but that doesn't mean that small companies with interesting ideas can't still get at least a small slice of this market. One of these services is Duck Duck Go, which has a rather silly name, but turns out to be a pretty interesting search engine. Duck Duck Go aims to get its users to their desired destinations in as few clicks as possible. Instead of long lists of results, Duck Duck Go simply tries to return the most relevant links about a given topic.

It was 5 years ago today that Yahoo! stopped using Google to power its searches and started using its own search technology, the company wrote today in a blog post. Everyone knows that things aren't looking good for Yahoo! in business terms, and the company's search and advertising market shares look even worse. But you know what deserves some celebration on this 5th birthday? The search team's work on some really cool search related technologies.

Yahoo! Search Monkey, BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) and Delicious are three big wins for the Yahoo! search team - even if no one has yet figured out how to turn them into money. That's not the only reason why we're all here on the web is it? Isn't it largely for love of innovation? Yahoo! in general, including the search team, deserve applause for their embrace of innovation.