The Engine of Possibility
It’s hard to believe it’s been only six months to the day we launched our own search technology and forever changed the way we develop and deploy Yahoo! Search products and services.
Yahoo! Campus on February 18, 2004
Since that time, search seems to increasingly be on a lot of people’s minds: users, webmasters, Internet companies, journalists, marketers, industry analysts, and investors alike all share a greater interest in the search industry than at any other time in the Internet’s history. When you think about it, the timing makes perfect sense as four separate events are converging:
- The influx of world class engineering talent drawn to the challenge of solving some of the most complex, yet commercially applicable and user valued technological problems anywhere. As Qi Lu, head of our engineering team likes to say, “search is like rocket science for the masses”. It’s no wonder then that our search team has grown the ranks of our PhDs 10 fold during the last two years.
- The massively scalable infrastructure those world class engineers have built enables us to build applications that we couldn’t even conceive of a few years ago.
- Long before the Internet, search was always an essential part of our lives. Whether searching for a house, a job, a significant other, or happiness in general, it’s not the concept of search that is new…it’s the digital application of search that has taken what was already a key part of our offline lives and made it even more indispensable.
- Thanks to the pioneering efforts of Overture and the creation of the pay for performance model, the substantial value being generated by search companies continues to be reinvested in talent, infrastructure and subsequently the innovations that are making search better everyday.
To some extent it is this convergence that has helped fuel a spirit of innovation at Yahoo! that is at the highest point I’ve seen since joining the company over three years ago. It also helps explain why, though it may sound cliche, we believe Yahoo! is in the position of being able to do virtually anything we set our minds to, with the only limitation being our collective imaginations.
It is this spirit of innovation and possibility that has been behind some of our most popular and well received products and features, including our two most recent launches: the local search beta and our anti-spy toolbar.
As excited as we’ve been about these product introductions, perhaps the best part is that we’ve quite literally only just begun. Be sure to check back here for news about new product introductions, updates and exclusive betas.
In addition, this blog is designed to provide a window into what our team is thinking and doing, in their own words (and maybe some guest bloggers as well).
Above all else we hope this blog enables you to share our excitement for the search industry and what the future holds.
We hope you enjoy it and invite your participation.
Thanks,
Jeff Weiner
SVP Yahoo! Search & Marketplace
Congratulations for creating this blog and let’s the comments opened!
cool to see you guys got comments open. I will be amazed if it stays that way, but am totally impressed that it started that way.
the one tip I could hope to give you guys is to try to build much more clarity (or perceived clarity) into your products and marketing.
since Google does most everything via automation and you guys have editors you should be able to show more information and make you technology easier for us SEO & Marketers to explain – and thus easier to spread your messages – go WebRank! ;)
Go Yahoo! Looking forward to Yahoo WebRank and other features-good luck with them and this blog!
Great Job! Really excited to see this up
Awsome to the Yahoo! Search Blog Team!!! It is a great example to show everyone that anyone can start a new blog with MovableType and Yahoo! Web Hosting.
Saludos!
Great stuff. I hope that Yahoo! uses this blog as a collection bucket for all the wonderful ways that people are using Yahoo! Search. For example, the people that lost touch with their college roommates. The lady who found the solution that saved her tomato plant, etc. Hopefully one day no one will call this site a corporate blog, but a customer blog!
Ooh, customer blog. There’s a good idea.
Congrats all.
Nice start from such a big company !!
Wish you good luck
Thanks for starting this blog. Now we can comment and discuss openly in this gr8 company website.
Will the bloggers for this Yahoo! search site be taking suggestions in this forum? I know the usual channels are filled with people who may not have the brightest ideas about search, but there might be a chance through this blog to hear from a community who not only has a vested interest, but thinks about search all the time…
Great to see this blog with the intro penned by a senior business leader rather than a techie. The right focus at startup.
Congratulations!
Good job!
(Um, it’s “Movable Type” and not “MovableType” as mentioned on the frontpage).
2 : 0 against the official Google Blog for you for enabling comments, and choosing RSS over Atom. If only the homepage would become uncluttered we might fall in love again. Right now all the lean and mean good stuff (like this new weblog) seems to be happening in the basement, while the front door suffers fatal portalitis…
Excellent idea. I hope you manage to keep it up-to-date!
Welcome to the blogosphere.
Great to see this feature on Yahoo!. Also, I have seen CraigsList using it on their listings in the bottom right corner. Great job. Thanks.
This is an excellent blog in true blogging form. It’s incredible to see that you have links to other relevant blogs along with comments and trackback open. Cheers to Yahoo! You have made favorites among the Search Engine blogging community.
For what will this Blog be used?
Fantastic! Now maybe we can get some answers.
Another daily “must read”. Beal, Battelle, now you guys. I need more time in my day. Good luck.
Wow – a large company with a blog that has open commenting. I look forward to seeing what becomes of this. I do hope that you answer some of the questions posed here so far. The changes that yahoo has mad has been great – like the addition of Rss to my yahoo (what was up with the outage on Sat – I thought that you were giving it up – pls don’t. Though there have been some downsides to the changes – like not being able to edit listing as in the past.
I’ll make sure to add this blog’s feed to “MY Yahoo”.
“Because There’s a Bastard In All of Us”
The Mad Dater – A Dating Blog
http://themaddater.blogspot.com
Broken HTML [1] (and I’m not surprised)! Movable Type generates 100% valid HTML, but your customisations seem to have ruined it. You don’t care for web standards, accessibility, etc., do you? [2]
[1]:http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ysearchblog.com%2Farchives%2F000012.html
[2]:http://www.livejournal.com/~mannu/130754.html
Manish:
The HTML will get fixed, don’t worry. It’s probably not the only detail that needs to be cleaned up, but we’ll take care of it.
Yahoo Team
Is it possible in the future
to imagine a “Yahoo dance”
It would be nice if the “SLURP”
came back more often.
Regard’s
PS: I like the new clean cut “SERP’S INTERFACE”
Congratulations on devoting some public space to the noble pursuit of “hooking people up with information”. There are still some interesting problems to be solved in the search domain. One of the most urgent is what I would call Scoped Searching and the Dreaded Second Click. A scoped (aka pipelined or meaning-based) search is one where a context for meaning has been established before a free-text search is launched on a specific subset or domain of records. A classic example is a search for “Apple”. Is the searcher looking for Apple computers, the fruit, or the Beatle’s music label? These days even a search for “Apple Music” doesn’t clearly imply a domain.
Despite years of efforts by a number of search companies to offer search folders and other UIs to scope searches, no widely accepted and general interface for getting the user to specify meaning has been established.
Looking at the issue a little deeper, how good is the average search engine user at scoping their own searches on initial term entry? (I ran a minor search engine for several years and also had access to the search logs of a top-5 engine — my conclusion is that the average user is not so great at query formation.) How many false starts and never-found information result from queries that are malformed? (Again, my research suggests that there still is a lot of wasted time and frustration involved for most search users.)
If you accept that somewhat dark scenario regarding the current state of the art of query parsing, is the answer better user education or a different UI? Probably both, but serious experimentation should begin on search widgets that are essentially “word toys”, allowing flexible and non-intrusive browsing of synonyms, meaning domains and alternate phrases while perhaps offering at-a-glance previews of potential results. As wonderfully fantastic as search may currently be, the future user will need something more than a black box to throw terms at.
Congrats on the launch. I hope you guys are able to keep it updated more often than Google does theirs!
It would also be nice if Yahoo people would hang out in places like Webmasterworld’s Yahoo forum, and participate when the going gets rough.
Congratulations on the launch! It is great to see you join the bloggers community. It is somehow both refreshing and reassuring.
Great to see a blog fro Yahoo, lets hope it opens up even more and all employees get one. Its also fantastic that you allow the great unwashed public like us to post comments, that shows great faith, in both us, and your level of service and product.
Nice one ;)
Didn’t google just do this? Day late and a dollar short. On the plus, its nice you let people leave comments (good and bad). I do wish you would improve your search and update your rules. You have obviously spammy sites listed yet drop some for a minor infraction. I don’t get it. I’m glad to see you still trying to improve because without competition we all lose. Keep at and hopefully one day I’ll be happy to yahoo……
Thanks to everyone for the feedback — itÂ’s great to get such enthusiastic responses and thoughtful insights. We have a lot in the works and look forward to sharing more with this community.
Congratulations to you all :)
A while back ago I heard about a yahoo search feature that would allow web site owners to pay yahoo to have their site crawled deep. Is such feature really available? If yes could someone point me to it?
I’m not so much interested in advertising, or sponsored placement, as I’m interested about having information “out there”.
Thank you for your time! and good luck!
-chris
Fantastic idea, in this way big scary enterprises became more close to the people.
Congratulations on the launch of Yahoo Search Blog. I hope you will provide lots of helpful information and keep the comments open for visitors to discuss.
I hope this proves to be a valuable effort. A blog defines itself across multiple posts, though – with only one post up so far it’s not really possible to discern what this is going to be.
A couple of observations. (1) If the tone continues to be this breathlessly gushing about Yahoo and everyone who ever worked there, it’s going to be hard to read. (2) It’s not clear that a single corporate blog about search is the right implementation of the blogging concept. Don’t you guys have hundreds of people (voices) involved in search? Maybe what you need is scores of blogs (Jeremy Zawodny’s is great).
Finally you guys started with the blogs! I can’t wait to start using your service!!!! Thanks Yahoo!!!!
Just something i longed to tell you, … it’s not that i would dislike your web directory but sometimes i can’t fancy for which qualities you guys choose a page …
This is great to see. Search has always been an exciting place to be, but it’s even better now that the major engines like Yahoo are opening up and stepping up.
Good to see a blog. Now, pay $299 and submit the url to Yahoo! Express so that it can be denied listing. You can then feel just like me – a sap for wasting money.
Did you guys notice that your URL spells out “Why search blog?”? Is there a hidden message here, or a non-sexual, self-effacing Freudian slip going on here? Just curious… Not sure if it is intentionally thought out this way in a sort of philosophical, why do we search way, but it reads to me more like why bother.
Nice work, really love that the comments are open!
One way to one-up the competition is to start making your newly released projects follow web standards.
Doug at Stopdesign posted a great article a few months ago on your newly released search: http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2003/04/09/yahoo_rebuilt.html
YAHOOOO going the blogging way…. Thats good to know, lets see when Yahoo launches a nice blogging service.
This is a wonderful idea. Congratulations to yahoo. Only wish you had thought of this earlier.
Please visit my blog at http://searchengineoptimizationnews.blogspot.com
Welcome to the party. I’d like to congratulate you on having the courage to allow comments, and would urge you not to cave on this just because it prompts the occasional tricky question. Erm, like this one:
When someone submits a commercial site via the main (US) Yahoo directory, they have to pay a recurring (annual) fee.
When someone submits a commercial site via the UK version of Yahoo, they only have to pay a one-off fee.
This applies to UK users who submit to regional or international categories. Why is that, exactly?
Bravo to Yahoo! for taking the blog plunge. Look forward to seeing how this evolves.
Mojo
http://www.clickmojo.com/
Cool. Looks like you start to learn from the google guys.
This is a step in the right direction, or better
back to the right direction that yahoo had in
the mid nineties.
I have announced you on my blog:
http://www.jonnygoodboy.com/index.php?p=98
Yahoo is still a bit lagging behing Yahoo, but I don`t think the way they are progressing they will be left behind..
I have only recently started blogging. I that short time I have noticed that google does a much better job of keeping up with blogs that get posted to very frequently.
Now You have your own yahoo.blog maybe you’ll do something about it?
Is it only a matter of handling data size before you are able to introduce an image search facility based on facial-recognition technologies (i.e. you put in your picture and back come similar ones / you put in your picture of a person and back come similar matches?). Scarey I know, but imagine the possibilities…..
Thank you Y! for providing this Blog. It’s nice to see it.
That’s a brave move, keeping the comments active and I respect you guys for it.
Thanks again.
why yahoo toolbar and yahoo messneger don’t exist
such as EXE files for download?
Yahoo! Welcome and Mucho Success.
We appreciate your entry and I’m sure we all want to learn more about Yahoo.
Geoffrey Gonzalez
Good Job yahoo I ‘ve been looking for a place like this for years !!!! Come on come on tell us more about desktop search :)
It would be great if you had sections where folks could (1) get answers to questions they have about how certain Yahoo Search features work and (2) post feature requests for Yahoo Search.
Actually, if you click on the feedback link on the lefthand side, you can easily email us directly. We’ll do our best to answer questions and would love to hear any suggestions you have re: what to blog about here.
Congratulations! As a Y! Alum wanted to extend my best wishes to the team.
Onward and upward!
What is next step of Yahoo?Does Yahoo will open other web page as this blog?I hope so.
I am impressed you actually linked to other SE bloggers (even SEO bloggers) – surprisingly, you left out http://www.ugfc.org ! :)
Excellent, Yahoo! When I can post on Keywords Co-Occurrence and Semantic Connectivity Research? (Just kidding) Great idea, this blog.
Orion
I think it’s cool that Yahoo have a searchblog too, and give users the opportunity to give feedback.
I’ve done a post recently about the new Yahoo search here: http://www.igniq.com/robs_blog/2004/08/yahoo-search.html
One request from me, please include an immediate URL removal form like Google does, sometimes it’s too long to wait until the index refreshes to get an URL removed.
I forgot to add,
two other features that would seal Yahoo search for me is a dictionary & calculator.
Please add these ASAP :)
OK gotta post again.
I’ve been using for the Yahoo! network such a long time but never found an official forum/blog…Therefore i’m pretty happy to see this place.
Ever since I read about desktop search on PCMag I have in mind a personal search engine that would go look into our emails, contacts (already available from the toolbar) calendar events, Notepad, Briefcase, Photos, Bookmarks and why not results from past entries in the search box…+ PC hard drives.I have no idea if this is what you guys have in mind know but when I saw Yussuf Medhi presenting the new MSN Search looking for stufff on/offline I was like “ok this is how I picture Yahoo’s response”…Anyway I personnaly expect this blog to tell us more about that project.
Keep up the good work!
Great product yahoo, I am happy to see a blog from yahoo, it is so weird both Google and Yahoo come out with a blog suddently, Anyway I hope to visit here often and see the latest news and improvements in yahoo search,
I have announced yahoo blog on my blog here:
http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-blog/2004/08/yahoos-new-search-blog.html
First of all, could you do something about not allowing people to post their own URLs here?
Second, why all the “congratulations”? I haven’t seen anything other than a “me too” effort and a self-congratulatory opener followed by nothing at all. I’d much rather see Yahoo devote its resources to existing forums elsewhere, to address big ongoing concerns about Yahoo’s performance. Yahoo’s presence has been seriously lacking in these other locations and, from what people are saying there, Yahoo hasn’t been responding very well to individuals’ contact with them. The net result is the impression that Yahoo doesn’t care. The existence of this blog proves nothing. Yahoo has gotten a bit of press from having a blog, and has shoehorned a lot of self-promotion into a supposedly thoughtful type of forum (which is what blogs are supposed to be). I’m not impressed.
MT! Why not WP? :)
Nice one. I really wanted someone to explain to me where did Yahoo Web Rank go? The toolbar no longer has an option…
Also, how come google manages to stay ahead on updates on web searches! Atleast the sites I checked for it…
But atleast you had the courage for an open Blog. I like it. :) But well… When do I get to a new post? This blog is the same since it launched…
Wonderful idea!
Now how do I get that nifty “Search this Blog” form on my blog page ?
I’ve been hunting for one for ages!
Hey great. Another reason to resist the complete hegemony of (another) search engine.
Hmm, 2 days, no new blog entry, reminds me of my own blog…
I dont but i dont see this blog with daily entries …This , IMO, looks more like a news blog for Yahoo’s search that is , for us to learn every steps they going thru to make Yaho search more performant…It does not seem they have something new to bring everyday…I believe they want our feedbacks for the way they golittle by little…I dunno…I see that more like a MS private beta newsgroup than a traditional blog….I may be wrong though
Congrats on the new blog, good move.
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It’s great to see a Yahoo blog. I’m looking forward to getting some nice insights into how the big ‘Y’ operates in the near future!
Chris
http://www.football-nut.co.uk
好！
支持！
Yahoo! is getting better by the minute. I miss the commercials… get more on air, they were awesome.
Also, now that you own Overture, why not enable plurals? Thanks, Love this.
http://www.SnapCheck.com
-Snappy
To respond to the 8/21 post, Yahoo DOES have a dictionary and calculator
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=define+confused
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=27*31%2B5
want to get my yahoo bak for some reason its lost and cant find the real yahoo messenger to down load ty hoe u can help me would like the file for yahoo messenger or show up on my toobar so i can get it bak ty
I am doing an Advertising Campaign on Yahoo! for class. I would greatly appreciate answers to these questions:
1. What do you HATE about Yahoo! And how would you change it?
2. What do you LOVE (or like) about Yahoo!
3. What does google have that Yahoo! doesn’t.
Thanks and hopefully I get some responses.
Nate
Well, I love Y! IM. It is sooo cool! I get to create a little person that looks kinda like me. I can also listen to music at the same time. It is so convenient and cool! Keep up the good work Y!
First of all the internet has become stagnant and is in dire need of something new. All the internet providers and search engines are doing the same things. It has become so big that it is hard for any one particular provider to get an edge on the rest. My plan would do that. I am talking about something that everyone who uses the internet would be very excited about. Something that would attract customers worldwide and not only bring more customers to your internet provider, search engine and home page, but with this new service subscribers would leave the other providers and switch to yours. There is absolutely no doubt about this.
Once again, the internet needs something new and exciting! Thank you very much for your time!
Respectively submitted,
Jim Hopper
ostrchop@msn.com