Yahoo Glue: I can’t believe it’s not Mahalo!

Yahoo has launched Yahoo Glue in the United States, a Mahalo style search engine that offers a mix of rich media and text along with traditional search results.

According to Mashable, Yahoo found the service so successful in their India test launch that they’re extending the product for inclusion in US search results off main Yahoo.com search queries.

Ask.com went down the same route back in October, although Yahoo isn’t extending the layout to all results just yet.

First impressions are positive: it’s a great way to take in search results. However there is a catch: the results are traditional Yahoo style lame. In fact the results in Glue are worse than the Yahoo search results, and the site seems to be truly Mahalo style as results aren’t automatically generated (as they are with Ask.com) but come from a set of pre-determined results, possibly even added by humans. While that makes for decent pages for searches like Barack Obama, it’s useless past maybe the B or C list in the world of politics, countries and celebrities, but presumably this will improve with time.

UPDATE: Yahoo has been in contact with some corrections. Glue is completely standalone and not part of general search, and the results are delivered by algorithm. We apologize for getting these facts wrong, but I have to ask: if the results are computer generated, why isn’t there more of them? I did ask and the response was that they plan to “continue expanding the coverage for Glue Pages over time.” I should clarify at this point that I actually love the layout, just the lack of depth, which is lame. Hopefully they’ll ramp it up soon. This is the sort of thing that might deal Yahoo back into the search game.