Since the early 90’s the automated search and retrieval of the so-called “deep web” has become the ultimate goal of every search engine. While Google recently introduced the Instant Search feature that delivers results on the spot, trends might change soon.
After almost 15 years on the go, Yahoo announced that it’s pulling the plug on its bots, crawlers and web spiders.
“Our business model is simple: automation kills jobs”, said Matt Jiggerson, chief engineer at Yahoo.
“All this software, searching thousands of web sites and storing millions of gigabytes of information does not fit in the current state of bad economy we are facing”.
Yahoo plans to substitute the bots, crawlers and web spiders with human workers, manually searching the Internet for every query to the Yahoo search engine. While results will lag, they will be presented with human intelligence as the researchers will all be trained Yahoo employees.
“We will probably be hiring 1.5 million people in the next 9 months – enough manpower to staff our new Manual Search engine”, said Matt Jiggerson.
“At this rate, we will be the biggest private employer in the US and will pass Google in terms of quality of results”, he added.
Chief search engine rival, Google, briefly commented on the news, stating that they are not concerned about “an army of underpaid employees” that might also be “drunk while on the job”.
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