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October 07, 2004

What's Cookin' at Yahoo! Next

Have you ever walked by a building or business and wondered what exactly was going on inside? Take a restaurant for example. When I was a kid, there was one restaurant that my parents would take us to every weekend. The food was incredible but, for me, the best thing was this huge window where you could see right into the kitchen.

Right after we would order, I would head on over to that kitchen window to see what was cooking. I got pretty good at figuring out when our dishes were being stir-fried, steamed, or braised by which ingredients were going to be thrown into the wok. As good as the food was though, I wanted to be able to tell the chef exactly how I wanted it: pan-fry those noodles just a little crispier, put more barbequed pork in, and can you please please please make it spicier?

So this leads us to why we created Yahoo! Next. Yahoo! Next is a technology preview site where we'll be putting up some of the ideas and products that we're working on. Drop by to play around and let us know what you think. You've probably heard by now about our debut idea, My Yahoo! Search, our first step towards Personal Search. Getting feedback from you on ideas like this will help us understand what's working and what's not. We wanted to give you a window to see some of the things that are cooking in our kitchen and give you a chance to let the chef know how to make it just right.

Hope to see you there.

Chung-Man Tam
Search Product Management
Yahoo! Search

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Comments

uh, is this a good thing? why can't this function as a client and in turn deny yahoo the ability to cull, store and otherwise investigate user search patterns? the feeling that i get from this is that combined with registered user data, you will be attempting to a) raise the mental switching cost for search engine regulars and b) capture query and activity information for users - some of whom might fall into the realm of oddball or (gasp!) just plain wrong...also, feels like a bit of a play on the furl/spurl/delicious game, particularly if you ever allow people to share their "mysearch" repositories..

just my opinion, of course...

oh, and btw, what you *saw* was a wok in that restaurant - but really, that food was all being microwaved in the back kitchen...just cold stuff being reheated ;)

Posted by: dave carpe | October 7, 2004 02:35 PM

Isn't this the same that you allready had in research.yahoo.com?

Posted by: cvander | October 7, 2004 04:01 PM

That's because it IS a play on the furl/spurl/delicious game, along with Eurekster/A9.com/Askjeeves etc. It's just where everyone is headed at this point. No doubt you'll see Google's and MSN's version in the near future.

The thing Yahoo has always excelled at beyond their competitors is the integration of a wide variety of services/content (even though some weren't so great individually), and it's for this very reason they also have the largest potential in the use of this technology.

Posted by: Anonymous | October 7, 2004 09:11 PM

the feeling that i get from this is that combined with registered user data, you will be attempting to a) raise the mental switching cost for search engine regulars and b) capture query and activity information for users - some of whom might fall into the realm of oddball or (gasp!) just plain wrong

Posted by: TugJobs | September 19, 2005 10:58 PM

um, so what happened to the sidebar search display? I like my search results listed on the side search bar, so I can just open them up to be displayed on the right (like msn, lycos, etc still do)... any way to restore that look/feel?

thx

Posted by: bubba | March 21, 2006 11:01 AM