One-upmanship is the name of the game. If Yahoo! wants to prove a point by adding Search Direct to its armoury, will Google lag behind?

The search engine major has been working on a project for the last two years that takes searching beyond keywords. This would allow users to discover more appropriate resources. “Whether it is finding images that look similar to one you have in mind or getting new wallpaper for your desktop, or even locating new recipes, beyond-keywords give a new user experience,” Mr Kavi Goel, a senior Google official, told Business Line .

Mr Goel, who was here to attend the World Wide Web conference along with his colleague Mr Mark Meiss, demonstrated how advanced the new search option was. The service is being tested before a launch.

He showed how a Recipe search option, which is built on the ‘beyond-keyword' concept, works.

Google put up a demo-centre at the WWW meet to showcase what was in store. “When someone searches on Google, we try to give the users best possible results quickly. But some of the answers might not be correct ones. Worse still, queries might be not sufficient enough to cull out the right answer,” Google staffers said.

Future options would move beyond the “static” answers, leaving scope for more interactive and fluid experience.

“Beyond-documents would also mean extracting relevant information for users. It is not about retrieving documents. We explore some of the bleeding-edge structured data and Web-mining projects within Google that focus on finding answers rather than simply retrieving documents,” he said.

But is this an answer to Search Direct? A Google staffer smiled. “What is that? I haven't heard of it?”

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