November 6, 2005 A Journey to the Center of Yahoo By JAMES FALLOWS NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/business/yourmoney/06techno.html?pagewanted=print I have never known how to think about Yahoo. I often turn to it for movie listings and driving maps. I have joined numerous Yahoo-based discussion groups, in which I read and occasionally write messages about various recreational interests. Of the more than 400 million Yahoo e-mail accounts worldwide, one belongs to me. But while I know that eBay is at heart an auction site and Amazon.com a retailer, I have not been sure what Yahoo "is" - apart, of course, from a company with a $53 billion market value and weekly revenue of more than $90 million, whose sites make up the largest single presence on the Internet and, according to company officials, account for 13 percent of all page views. Last month, I spent a day at the company's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., asking officials what they had in mind. My visit was prompted by the accelerating stream of new Yahoo offerings, often based on acquisitions. Two years ago, Yahoo had no search engine of its own and licensed Google for its searches. One after another, it bought other leading search companies - notably Inktomi, AltaVista and Overture - and built its own new Web search system, which now rivals Google's in speed and accuracy. Late last year, Yahoo made a deal with the tiny X1 Technologies company, which had created the best desktop search system for files on Windows computers. (X1 rivals the Spotlight desktop search, which is built into the latest Macintosh operating system.) As a stand-alone product, X1 sells for $75 and up; under the name Yahoo Desktop Search, Yahoo's Web site offers its version free. This year, Yahoo also bought Flickr, a system for storing, sharing and commenting on photographs; a scheduling application called Upcoming; and the mail utility Oddpost, on which it is basing a new e-mail system. Last year, Yahoo overtook Hotmail to become the world's most-used free e-mail service. Its new e-mail system, now running in a limited beta version and scheduled for release next year, applies technology called Ajax, discussed in a previous column, to mimic the speed and power of a normal desktop program. When I tried the beta release of the new mail program, I was amazed that I could, for instance, quickly view the contents of an e-mail message without opening it, via a "preview pane" like Outlook's - while operating over a normal Web browser. Yahoo, meanwhile, has intensified operations in its offices in Santa Monica, Calif., to bring more music, video and news content to its sites. What's this all about? After talking with the chief executive, Terry S. Semel, and other officials, I came away with two big impressions. One is that while Yahoo is ever conscious of Google and determined to match it head to head in familiar keyword search, in the long run its plans for search seem quite different from Google's. The other is that Yahoo views the very scale and sprawl of its operations - the seemingly random assemblage of sites and functions, the 200 million active users in more than 20 countries - as a crucial competitive advantage. The awareness of Google came through in nearly every conversation. I was reminded repeatedly that blind-test panels had found no difference in speed or accuracy between Yahoo's results and those of "another leading company." The chief technology officer, Farzad Nazem, said that Google now had the exciting sheen of being "the newest kid on the block" and the fastest-growing company. "I know all about that, because that's how it was for us back in '99, 2000," he said. "We sneezed; it was like it was from God. I understand the whole thing." But Mr. Nazem and everyone else really wanted to discuss what lay beyond these keyword searches of the entire Web. "You can look at the evolution of search as a play in three acts," said Jeff Weiner, the senior vice president for search and marketing. "The first is the 'public' Web, where if different people type the same query they'll all get the same results." The second, he said, was purely personal search - finding a file or photo, usually on your own machine. "The third is the one that we are very interested in," Mr. Weiner said. This is "social" or "community" searching, in which each attempt to find the right restaurant listing, medical advice site, vacation tip or other bit of information takes advantage of other people's successes and failures in locating the same information. The idea that human judgment can improve a search engine's automatic findings is hardly new. From the dawn of the Web's history - that is, over the last 15 years - companies have invented tools to help users assess the quality and relevance of information, often by relying on others' opinions. Examples include Amazon's user reviews, eBay's feedback ratings and "trusted networks" created on many sites. What is different is Yahoo's systematic plan to build "community intelligence" into nearly all aspects of its operation - and in turn, to entice users to spend more and more of their time on Yahoo sites, where they can see Yahoo ads. The clearest example, of many I heard about, can be seen at http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com, the beta version of a new search site. A query from this page will return results from three sources. One is "My Web," or pages each user has marked and asked Yahoo to save for later reference. (These pages are saved by Yahoo itself, on its servers, and don't gum up your own machine.) Another is "Everyone's Web," the general Internet. Finally, there is "My Community's Web," pages marked as interesting or valuable by members of a social network. Thus, a search for information on new cars would bring up normal Web results, but also listings you had seen and wanted to retain, as well as friends' advice on brands and dealers they had tried. Setting up a social network to provide advice can take time. But Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr and now a Yahoo executive, pointed out that virtually everyone under 30 had already created such networks. What about those not young or hip enough to have done so yet? Eventually, according to Ms. Fake, more users would create networks as the process became easier and more worthwhile. Mr. Nazem said, "We're really about getting the average consumer to move their lives online." Why should Yahoo's community intelligence be better than others' half-successful earlier attempts? This is where its argument about scale comes in. "It is a key strength that our community is so large," said Mr. Semel, who has seen Yahoo's user base double in his four years as chief executive. With hundreds of millions of users, there is critical mass to create social networks that cover most locations and interests - for instance, a large and active user group among women in the United Arab Emirates. VAST scale presents its challenges. "You can think about the way people will interact, as you sit in the usability lab, but until you put it in front of very large numbers of real people, you don't really know," Ms. Fake said. "So you have to release products early and often, like perpetual beta." But the advantages, she said, are greater. More than one billion photos are now available for public view on Flickr. "The value of the system is in the aggregate," she said. When millions of people place their comments on a billion-plus photos, surprising patterns emerge: what is interesting, what is offensive, what information people want to share about themselves. I still am not sure how to think about Yahoo. But I will think about it more than I used to. ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
