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Faced with the uphill challenge of competing against Google for pole position among search engines, Yahoo made some serious headway this week when they announced plans to roll out the “Web of Objects,” a new take on search engine operations that’s inching closer and closer to full-fledged AI.

Reviews, Show Times, Basic Info - What More Could You Want?

The main premise of the project operates behind one major motto: “Death to the 10 Blue Links.” That now standard search engine page listing of 10 hyperlinks Yahoo is declaring taboo, and they’re set to do something about it.

A video interview with Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo’s Labs and Search Strategy Director, didn’t yield the most fluid explanation of what exactly we’re going to see when the new WOO goes live, but it should cater to your needs quite well.

Check out this quotable from Raghavan:

“The real world we live and work in is full of objects – politicians, professors, monuments, restaurants, neighborhoods. Each has certain attributes, like what kind of food [the restaurant] serves or where it is located.”

Thus, a search for Star Trek, as Raghavan points out on Kara Swisher’s video blog, would yield showtimes, cast listings, critical reviews and other pertinent, official information about the film, rather than the film’s official website and a series of Trekkie forums. Raghavan elaborates:

“We’re building a view of the world. Say you come with a query; the first thing we do is figure out what this person is intending to do. Then, instead of giving you ten blue links, we give you the object satisfying your intent.”

So if you type in a street address, the first thing you’ll likely see is an option to get directions to that particular address– a great improvement over the real estate listings that currently show up on Yahoo’s first page.

Obviously this is something that will take a few rounds of tweaking to get right. Yahoo plans to use a little bit of common sense (someone searching Syracuse restaurant at 6pm Eastern Time will get Syracuse, New York listings instead of those for the Syracuse in Sicily) and some serious research (Yahoo’s SeachMonkey project will seriously aid the cause), but the whole operation could be a little touch-and-go in its early stages.

Yahoo’s going to test the market a little bit with some smaller sample studies. If everything goes well we should expect to see this WOO rolled out in the next two or three months.

Buckle up.