Yahoo's search group attempts to take control of its destiny by launching its own browser. Surprise: It's good.
Yahoo is announcing tonight that it's getting into the browser business with its new Axis browser. There are versions for
iPad and
iPhone, and plug-ins for the desktop browsers Chrome,
Firefox, IE, and Safari.
The design goal, according to Ethan Batraski, head of product
for the Search Innovation Group at Yahoo, is to eliminate the middle
step in the usual Web search process: Enter a query, see the results, go
to a page. With Axis, you're supposed to be able to go directly from
query to page, skipping the step of surfing a sea of links.
The implication that Axis entirely bypasses the need to pick
from search results is false, but Axis does nonetheless have a much
better way of getting you from searching to visiting a Web page. The
browser works well. This is an aggressive product for the struggling
Yahoo to launch out of its search group.
Here's why: Yahoo, which still generates more than a billion dollars
a year in revenue from its search division, makes a lot of that money
from that second step in the search process. It runs ads on search
result pages.
On Axis, there are no search result pages.
Instead, what you get when you search, at least 80 percent of the time,
Batraski says, is a horizontal display of Web page thumbnails. (The
other 20 percent of the time you get text boxes with results in them.)
It's easy to see if one of the pages is what you're looking for, and
then you can go there directly. To see the tiles again and go to other
results, you just pull down the page from the top. To move forward or
backward in the list of results directly from a page you're on, you drag
your finger from the right or left. bypassing the results list
entirely.
So, to be clear, there actually is a list of search
results. It just looks a lot better because it's integrated into the
browser. Ads will get inserted into the list of search tiles eventually,
assuming the product is a success with users. But for the time being,
the more successful Axis is, the more it will drive Yahoo traffic away
from search revenues -- which only this last quarter began to recover after years of sliding.
As a tactic for launching the browser, focusing on the user
experience above all and forgoing search revenues is probably very wise,
since it may be difficult for the browser to make a dent in the market.
I asked Batraski about other alterna-browsers that struggled to win
major market share, and mostly failed: Flock, Rockmelt, Opera,
AT&T's Pogo, and others. Why does Yahoo think it can pull a Chrome
with its product?
Distribution, says Batraski. There are 700
million people using Yahoo, and they can all be marketed to. Also, Yahoo
distributes browsers (mostly IE with the Yahoo embedded toolbar) to 80
million people a year. The company knows how to get browsers out there,
at least on desktop operating systems. But Axis on the desktop is
actually not its own browser, but rather a plug-in that works with the
browser a user already has. If you use the plug-in's URL and search box
in the lower-left of your browser, you'll get Yahoo's results. If you
forget it's there and use the browser's standard URL/search box, you get
whatever you've already been getting.
One gets the feeling that the desktop versions of Axis exist
primarily as accessories to the mobile versions, so users can move
between platforms and keep their open tabs and histories intact. When
you're logged in, Axis knows what you do on each device and makes it
easy to pick up on one where you left off on another.
Mobile is where the action is, so it makes sense that Yahoo
threw the bulk of its development love into the tablet and smartphone
versions. On the iPad, Axis is simply a great browser. The integrated
search feature is intuitive, and being able to move through search
results without having to go back to search makes sense. After only a
few minutes using it I thought, Why hasn't Google done this yet? It's
that good.
Although mobile devices like the iPad come with embedded
browsers, Batraski says the product has Apple's blessing. He also said
that Apple reps have told him they're not throwing many resources into
Apple's own iOS browser, Safari. Axis takes the best that Safari has to
offer -- its core rendering engine, Webkit -- and really does make it
better. But no matter what Apple says, it's not yet fully behind
alternative browsers like Axis: On iOS, you can't change your default
browser (unless you jailbreak your device).
Click a link in an e-mail message or another app, and your device will
open it up in Safari, no matter how in love with Axis you are.
Batraski is convinced this will change eventually, and that if
it doesn't, Apple will have a Microsoft-scale antitrust issue on its
hands.
What about Android? The Android version of Axis is still
in development, and while it's much easier for a user to get an
alternative browser installed and embedded in an Android product, it's a
pretty safe bet that Google isn't exactly going to roll out the welcome
mat for Yahoo's browser. Google already has two of its own browsers for
mobile, the Android browser and the still-in-beta Android version of
Chrome. And those drive traffic to Google's ads, not Yahoo's. (Firefox,
by the way, defaults to using Google for search, so even when people use
it instead of Chrome, Google still wins.)
The Axis browser may not conquer the world, but it is a very
strong mobile product with an important new design concept for search.
It's also a gutsy business move from Yahoo. It's rather refreshing
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