On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 8:08 PM, Venkatraman S <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I do not consider Y! here - am always confused whether they are a media > company or a tech company! btw...i happen to know of an instance wherein in > one of the Y! interviews(for their search team) - the interviewer ended up > asking the interviewee about the fields in the RSS feed :P and asked how the > individual fields that can be stored in a MySQL table.
I'll try to not look like I'm speaking as a Yahoo! employee here :) Instead, I shall merely try to explain why the notion of 'monopoly' is a common running thread across all stock-market driven companies such as Google or Yahoo! or Microsoft. I'll try and elaborate why its not really in the companies hands to be pure of heart given the conficting drive to make profits. and interestingly, even a seemingly altrusitic thing such as releasing "really cool" FOSS tool. The motive is the same. The approach, different. You gotta understand one thing: End of the day, both Yahoo! and Google are companies into which the market has invested money and they need to make 'profits' against the money invested. Don't make profits, nobody wants to invest in you. Emotional affectives such as freedom to the world do always take a back seat because the investors don't shake a leg about such affectives. Doesn't matter whether its a Google or a Microsoft or a Yahoo!. What differs amongst these is how they intend to make the money. However, there is clearly nothing different in what they all want to do: to gain an exclusive market space and keep making money in such a way that its difficult for competitors to take away your market share. Microsoft's strategies has been the three Es (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (see wikipedia for details)). Google's strategy has been to provide a free-value network to people while making that a marketplace for advertisers to show their ads. Yahoo! had created a marketplace for itself by making itself the number one destination on the internet (yes, even today, Yahoo.com is the most visited website on the planet). People (especially those of the US) visit Yahoo! because that's where their tidbits of their daily lives come from - Mail, News, Photos, bookmarks, media sharing and so on. Yahoo! had traditionally been making money pretty well by displaying advertisements on these 'destinations'. We all know about how advertising drives up sales and so on. While traditional advertising is all about registering a brand in the observer's mind, a significant portion of advertising is also to find out the user's intent. While each Yahoo! destination went the way of mining the user's data and using it to deliver relevant ads, Google's strategy was quite different - they ended up asking the user to provide his intention into a search box. That's where, things took a big turn in how the internet advertising industry evolved. Soon advertisers saw the great potential of search based advertising and Google became a one-hit wonder. So, its all about the advertisements in the end. Google does it by some ways. Yahoo! uses some other... and there are lot of overlaps between the two too. Now, both have figured, being destinations isn't the way they are going to grow further and that being good with interoperability is the way to go. Google allows folks to access their data through APIs. Yahoo! also has APIs to a lot of it's services (del.icio.us, flickr, maps... and I'm sure you heard about Search Monkey :) ). Besides APIs, I can say with certainity, amongst google and Yahoo!, Yahoo! has released quite a lot of pretty interesting open source software. The first that comes to my mind is Hadoop and all the work around hadoop (pig, etc.,.)... and for the common netizen, YUI, Yahoo!'s contributions to mysql and even the FreeBSD project. Compare this to the 'funding' by Google to the Mozilla project. IMO, it is merely a distribution 'deal' (ie.,. to have google as the default search engine) than a funding per-se. You see, I'm not saying Google is evil. I'm saying, even if google's pure-hearted intention was to fund the Mozilla project, they wouldn't have been able to do it without explaining to their investors why they want to give away that money. Becoming the default search engine on Mozilla is their answer to the investors. Finally, I'd like to throw some perspective about the 'question' you were asked in your interview. Before I joined Yahoo!, I worked for an embedded systems company. The challenges there are quite different: It's about being memory efficient and the data one deals with is typically small. For instance, one of my interview questions was to write a program to extract common words between two files. My initial answer was a technically working answer. But the moment my interviewer asked me "What if there were a million words in both the files?", I had to rethink my program because now we are talking a completely different scale and the problem has morphed into a new one. Its not about 'finding' the intersection, but about finding it effectively given the large scale. Extracting and storing an RSS feed into a database is a very similar question too. It has quite a few elements that can be optimised and they were just testing your design, data structure and approach, IMO. Imagine, you have a billion RSS feeds to process, wouldn't you have to think differently about how you'll do trivial things such as sorting or defining your database schema? Would you even be able to run a single database instance? ... and how are you going to be fault-tolerant? Cheers, -Suraj -- Home: http://sunson.in/ _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
