Google's status as the world's most popular internet search engine, and its continuing inroads into e-commerce, will be discussed at Yahoo's analyst day in San Francisco today.
Yahoo! want to encourage users to submit more specific, personalised content to their webpages to increase search results. It will persuade users to submit keywords to photos posted on the web, publish reviews of their favourite things, and attach more meaningful tags to their homepages.
Jeff Weiner, senior vice-president of search at Yahoo!, told the Financial Times: "There is a lot more knowledge in the world to be gained and the way you do that is by going beyond the tens of millions of websites created by editors and publishers and tapping into the authority of everyday people."
Yahoo! says the "social information" will be used to produce more meaningful search results, which it in turn hopes will narrow the gap between it and Google.
Yesterday, Yahoo! previewed its redesigned , as it aims to strengthen its advertising appeal. The redesign is its first major overhaul since September 2004, which gave more prominence to the search box on Yahoo!.
The upgrade will include a new facility called Yahoo! Pulse, which will offer user recommendations on everything from music, film and literature, to restaurants, bars and clubs.
Dan Rosensweig, Yahoo's chief operating officer, said: "We feel like this [redesign] does something great for everybody. The site was getting pretty long in the tooth and looking pretty old fashioned. Now it looks clean, crisp and modern."
Yahoo! has been involved with a series of ventures to increase its profile as a "social search" portal, including Flickr, where people can share photos, Del.icio.us, where users can recommend their favourite websites and Upcoming, which provides localised information on forthcoming events.
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