Five Years of Yahoo! Search
- Posted February 18th, 2009 at 10:02 am by Yahoo! Search
- Categories: News/Announcements
Five years ago today, Yahoo! launched its own search engine. Since then, we’ve introduced a host of new features, vastly improved the relevance of both our algorithmic and sponsored results, and learned some important lessons. Search technology is still in its infancy, and there are limitless opportunities for innovation. Since big anniversaries only come so often, we wanted to reflect on what we’ve done and examine our focus for the years ahead.
In the last five years, we’ve reached some important milestones:
• Opened our search infrastructure and index to outside developers with BOSS.
• Opened our search results page to outside innovation with SearchMonkey.
• Launched Search Assist, still the most sophisticated query assistance technology on the Web.
• Launched a suite of mobile search products including Yahoo! oneSearchTM.
• Acquired, grew, and improved Delicious, a top social bookmarking tool.
• Launched Site Explorer to help site owners to manage their presence on Yahoo! Search.
• Protected users from potential viruses, spyware, and spam with SearchScan.
• Integrated musicand video players directly on the search results page.
And while it’s fun to look back, we’re continuing to innovate for the future by:
• Continuing to open our search results page and infrastructure to improve Yahoo! Search and encourage innovation in the industry.
• Focusing on detecting and responding better to query intent.
• Breaking the ten-blue-links paradigm by developing a richer, more adaptive search results page.
• Making it easier to conduct and share online research with Search Pad.
• Delivering a new and better advertising experience that improves relevance for our users and ROI for our advertisers.
Making tens of billions of Web pages instantly searchable is a huge task, but we also had a lot of fun along the way. To celebrate our fifth anniversary, the folks at the Food Network show Dinner Impossible came to tape an episode at our campus last month. Chef Robert Irvine had one tough challenge – cook a multi-course dinner for our hungry engineers and search geeks. The show won’t air until April, so our lips are sealed on how it all turned out. However, we can tell you two things – it wasn’t easy and we had a great time, which is exactly how we’d characterize the last five years at Yahoo! Search.
We’d like to extend a huge thanks to our users. Your support and feedback keep us focused on building the best search engine on the Web.
Tuoc Luong
SVP, Search Engineering, Yahoo! Search
Larry Cornett
Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search
- 37 Comments
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congrats guys!
Wish you happy b’day Yahoo , and I also wish you NO layoffs.
CEO of Livecrunch.
We wish you continued success. Don’t sell Yahoo! We will continue to send more customers your way.
Happy Birthday!! Keep up the good work!
Well done Y!
Congrats..Shared the happy news with my readers. Keep up the good work.
Don’t just look back at the good things, look at the mistakes you’ve begun to correct. Your advances in search tech in such a short time is truly an amazing technical feat. But don’t forget about some of the simple things that cost you so much of your share in the search market.
The old Y! toolbar could have been huge! Instead Y! squandered the opportunity by puking all over the file systems of its users and attempted to grab more value than it provided. With each computer professional likely touching at least 10 non-tech users, you had a lot of people telling folks not to touch anything Yahoo! because Yahoo! would cause your system to run slower and be in your face all the time. You lost a lot during that time but recently you’ve gotten better and fewer people warn of installing Y! software. I don’t think it’s too late, especially in light of all the cool, open stuff you’ve been providing. But please, don’t make the same mistake of trying to harvest more value than you create at the expense of your user. Give them something *they* want as opposed to taking the opportunity of user curiosity and attempting to turn it into your own playground at the users’ expense.
I’m getting comfortable recommending Y! again so that’s at least me +10. Keep improving your search results (which are pretty darn good these days!) and remember that your users don’t want to be exploited and I’d expect your market share to increase further.
I like Google too but I think it’s healthy having [at least] two competent players and Y! is in the catbird seat.
Yahoo Search is better than that company that starts with a “G.” You just need to promote yourselves more. You have the better product right now.
Feliz cumpleanos mi querido Yahoo! Search, sigan mejorando y pronto se tomaremos la delantera en la web. Lo siento Google…
Arriba Yahoo!
I read this thinking “they’ve been around MUCH longer than that, I used them at university”, but of course that’s the directory. Congratulations and may you continue to grow!
Keep it up Y!…. :)
I Wish Yahoo All the Very Best and hope to see some more cool features from it in the coming months and year ahead.
Happy Birthday – competition is important for us end users, here’s hoping you can grow market share in the months and years to come!
By the way – can you change you CAPTCHA? It’s really hard for humans to read! :)
Congrats, I didn’t knew that 5 years ago you launched Yahoo! Search engine. I thought Yahoo! SE is older.. :)
Happy birthday, Yahoo Search! I sincerely wish another round of successful years for you!
Happy Birthday! and hope you rise like a phoenix!
All the best!
Happy Birthday from a little fish.
Happy Birthday to yahoo!Search!!! Keep up the good work and good service!
Thank you for making the internet a richer place, here’s to many more years of success!
Keep it up for the next 5x years!
Wish you happy b’day Yahoo , and I also wish you NO layoffs.
Well done Yahoo! Keep it up :)
great yahoo.
Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday dear Yahoo… Happy Birthday to youuuuu!! :)
Congratualtions and keep up the good work!!! :)
Congrats… Keep it up for the continuous years!
Your opening ad for Yahoo search on a milk carton is very offensive. This should be pulled and the marketing company fired. It is absurd & outlandish you would resort to a missing child venue for your ads & revenue. You should be ashamed. Are you cold hearted idiots? Do you know how many people you have offended? It is so distasteful in this day in age considering the number of children missing. So selfish of Yahoo & that is so low. God help you.
Happy Birthday! Congratualtions and keep up the good work!
Happy Birth Day :-)
Great services,,,
Am having a problem with my search account.. Am trying to change my ad copy which is is open quotes. the first letter i need to be in capital letter but am not able to change. also tried with diff add title. in the description am not able to can. can anyone give an idea.
congrats, we are proud yahoo member
Keep up the good work.
Great stuff guys, I really hope you will grow…and not only stock wise…
Keep up the good work. I have been using your services more and more!
a wonderful tool !
Thanks and hope you will stay more with us
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