Mediapost: Search Engines Eye Personalized Results

Search executives at a trade conference yesterday spoke of search engine customization and personalization as a key priority for their development efforts, in their ongoing fight for marketshare. Yahoo's Tim Cadogan told the Search Engine Strategies crowd that each point of share in that market was worth about $200 million in expected ad fees.

Yahoo plans on letting people search communally together over Instant Messenger. Eurekster, a social networking startup, already allows communities of people to benefit from communal search selections. Paul Gardi, SVP at Ask Jeeves said that his site was moving beyond using a mere list of sites as output for a search request, providing direct answers to questions out of database information as well.