Yahoo is announcing that it will let companies introduce their own data to its search results - a first step in the company giving third parties access to its search engine. The move good lead to more traffic partner sites, as well as a competitive search advantage for Yahoo, against dominant rival Google.

In an example given by Yahoo, review site Yelp could include data about, say, a restaurant review, that appears within search results (screenshot, below). The result would show Yelp user rankings for the restaurant and links to other information as well as links to relevant pages on the Yelp site, not just a headline, a blog of text and a URL.

Essentially, third parties like Yelp supply Yahoo with data, then Yahoo search’s machine learning system figures out how it will incorporate that data into search results.

The end result is that a user can quickly find more relevant information from within a site like Yelp, without having to click around within the site. If this proves to be the case, it is basically in every company’s interest to spend time making sure their data is presented well in Yahoo search results. In turn, a large number of detailed search results could help Yahoo win back search users from rival Google.

As Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan points out, Google has had its own custom search results option running since 2006, called Subscribed Links — but neither companies nor searchers have been using it. Yahoo tells Sullivan that its service will be different because results that use third-party data will appear for all users. In Google’s case

Longer-term, Yahoo may consider providing third parties with even more access to its search features — maybe even giving third parties access to the Yahoo search index, itself, and let third parties influence search result rankings.

Google, meanwhile, has been looking at a wide range of options for improving its own search results. Even though it is exploring concepts like Subscribed Links and “social search” — using friend relationships to match your search query with a result — the company has been relatively more reluctant to give third parties access to its regular search results. (See our interview with Google’s Marissa Meyer for more.)

In fact, one intriguing idea here is that a social network like Facebook could introduce its “social graph” — or your list of friends and information about your relationships with them — to Yahoo search.

Doug Sherrets contributed to this article.

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