The Yahoo Search blog has announced that it will start rolling out changes in its indexing and crawling algorithms, so there should be a lot of changes in rankings very soon. Many webmasters are already feeling the changes, and there’s sure to be more in the days to follow.

Yahoo has not issued specifics, so people speculate. Almost every webmaster forum has a thread dedicated to just guessing – albeit intelligently – what Yahoo is cooking up. One of the more popular speculations is that the search engine giant may be starting to implement Concept Search, which is best summarized by the excerpt from BNet:

“Concept Searches solve the term mismatch problem in the sense that a concept search will return documents that relate to the same concept as the query word, irrespective of the specific word chosen by the user and the specific words in the documents. At the same time, concept searches contribute to the other fundamental goal of information retrieval systems: increasing coverage.”

Could Yahoo really be smartening up its technology by relying less on keywords and more on related context? If so, then this is great news for websites that already use latent semantic indexing, as they would appear even more relevant to Yahoo. Big content websites that interlink their pages also stand to benefit, perhaps just as well as social networking sites that publish user-generated content.

We will certainly be watching this new trend, and report on how it affects our websites. So far, we have been providing concept-search-optimized content to our clients, so it should be interesting to see how our rankings fare out.

By the way, there is Concept Search demo available here.