In a World Wide Web where most website addresses start with the letters “www”, a search for this phrase presents an interesting challenge. Google feels lucky to send me to … the Yahoo! homepage. A search on Yahoo! for that term, on the other hand, hits the WWW2006 conference webpage and the organizer’s site as the first two results. That works for me ? but even more important, it returns the MyWeb results for the two items I truly care about - the workshop I participate in, and the schedule.

Indeed, in the last few weeks, when people around me mention WWW (dubbed “dub dub dub” ha!), they are talking about the 15th International World Wide Web conference, taking place this week in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Other than making the conference ?findable?, Yahoo! is making some key contributions to WWW 2006, both as a sponsor and as a contributor to the discussion. Among the many Yahoos here are Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Andrei Broder, Andrew Tomkins and Ravi Kumar. If you include Jan Pedersen, who skipped this year, these researchers are responsible for more or less half of web history’s search innovation (and around 68% of its textbooks). There are at least five papers and four posters by Yahoos at the conference as well. These include a candidate for best paper (Visualizing Tags Over Time by Dubinko at al.), as well as papers on topics of community, annotation, one on queries, and two on search … sounds about right.

Amongst the posters are two interesting studies from Ricardo, another on queries, and one of my own - work on geotagged Flickr images, which one of our interns, Alex Jaffe, was a major contributor too.

Monday I also presented on the Collaborative Tagging Workshop where Yahoo?s interest and participation was very evident. Even behind the scenes ? most of the tagging workshop papers used data from Flickr or Delicious, or both.

So, if you are here at Edinburgh, by all means try to find me and say hello! I’ll be the tallest guy around. If you are not here, free to check out Yahoo! Research for papers, updates and interesting demos!

Mor Naaman
Research Scientist, Yahoo! Research Berkeley