Forget search . . . browse is the new search . . . ie attention aggregator . . . according to Ash Patel, CPO of Yahoo . . . (via om)

My.Yahoo.Com is no longer a portal page, but instead an “attention page” which can be and should be leveraged to become the aggregator site for complicated digital life. Ash, who spent a lot of time on that particular page - building it I mean - agreed.

AV in Battelle’s comment section also has a good note . .

Its amazing why people miss Terry Semel’s - and Sue Weber’s - repeated assertions that Search is not really the biggest piece of yahoo. Yahoo keeps putting the ‘my’ in search, music, messenger, syndicating content. There are many non-geeks who don’t know RSS but use my.yahoo’s RSS syndication. These are the same folks who use my.yahoo.com for checking local cinema listings, temperatures and stocks

A few month ago, I felt that browse is making a comeback against search and its coming true via various “my page” incarnations. Furthermore, last night a buddy of mine told me of the rising popularity of “link portals/directories” in China. Because typing in Chinese is harder than English (but people are not English literate) and all URL’s is in English, search engine growth is being tempered by “attention” sites that create link structures to allow people to navigate the web not by search but by browse . . . just amazing how cultural difference can amplify a trend. . .

Of course for the trend to actually be monetizable for Yahoo, they need to match or exceed Google’s content ad serving technology . . . which is highly technical and data mining/machine learning based . . . This does not bode well for Yahoo because they lost the search game precisely because they didnt have the technical talent to build better search algorithms . . . maybe they can use the Mechanical Turk to serve targeted ads?