Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Time: 10:45 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.
Panel: Real Time Search & The Major Search Engines
Speaker: Ivan Davtchev, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Time: 1:30 p.m. – 2:45 p.m.
Panel: Search Meets Display, Display Meets Search
Speaker: David Oliveira, Regional Vice President Sales, Yahoo!

Time: 4:45 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Panel: Ask The Paid Search Reps
Speaker: Tomaso Pozzi, Product Manager, Yahoo!

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Time: 9 a.m. – 9:45 a.m.
Panel: Keynote – The State Of The Search Union
Speaker: David Roth, Director of Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo! Inc.

Time: 10 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.
Panel: Bringing SEO In House: How To Be Successful!
Speaker: Laura Lippay, Director of Technical Marketing, Yahoo!

Time: 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Panel: Ask The Search Engines
Speaker: Arnab Bhattacharjee, Senior Director, Yahoo! Search Technology and Engineering, Yahoo!

We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Yahoo! Search Team

It has been a busy month since Shashi Seth joined Yahoo! as our new Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products. Shashi brings with him a wealth of experience from  Google, eBay, Cooliris, and AOL. As the head of Search, Shashi has emphasized his commitment to Yahoo!’s stake in the search market. In this video, he talks about his first month at Yahoo! and clarifies what he sees as some of the most important aspects of the agreement with Microsoft.

With the Microsoft search alliance, “there is a great opportunity for us to change the game in search by focusing on the consumer experience and bringing things to the front end of search like real time information, shortcuts, vertical intent, query analysis, and suggestions,” Shashi says. “The deal could bring a lot of great things for us especially in focusing on the consumer experience.”

Find out more about Shashi’s first month at Yahoo! in the video above.

Yahoo! Search Team

Earlier this year Yahoo! welcomed Yoelle Maarek as our new senior director of Yahoo! Research. Prior to joining Yahoo!, Yoelle was the Director of Google Haifa Engineering Center, which she opened in July 2006. For more than 20 years, Yoelle has been helping dig into search problems. She talks with the Yahoo! Search Blog about new developments in search and challenges in this field.

Yahoo! Search Blog: Tell us a bit about your research background – what are your main topics of interest?

Yoelle Maarek: My research background is core information retrieval, the computer science discipline behind search. I got my PhD in this domain more than 20 years ago, and published my first SIGIR paper in 1989 — way before the Web existed as we know it. At that time, our test collections counted about 300 documents with associated relevance judgments. It’s crazy to think how far we‘ve come.

Besides search, I am interested in most Web technologies, with a special taste for user-facing applications. I like to make people wonder what kind of smart algorithms and powerful backend systems were developed to make things work. . I love demo-able applications, anything that makes the user happier and creates either a “wow” effect or significantly simplifies the user’s life on the Web.

What are the main future challenges in Search?

The challenges are to always make systems more user-friendly, more relevant, and faster. We need to guess what users want even before they know it themselves. I am a strong believer in leveraging larger and larger data sets, and personalizing more and more.

We are far from having reached the full potential of technology here, one reason being the fact that our favorite tools and applications do not share enough data. Even more problematic is the privacy issue. We need our users to trust us before we can use their data as we wished. It is probably both a technical and society/cultural challenge, which makes it even more interesting.

What are some exciting developments you are seeing in innovating the search experience?

I think the search box could be the “next frontier” in search – I am referring to the point I made a bit earlier about “guessing” what users want. The major search engines have started to add query assistance and completion abilities to their search box, as with Yahoo! Search Assist, Google Suggest, and even recently by Bing. I believe that these tools are only a first step and that they open the doors to a great deal of innovation. They establish a dialog with users even before users are done formulating their informational or navigational needs. As such, they can influence, facilitate, and direct the users in ways we had not imagined until now.

On your Web site, you write “I believe in search and statistics not in NLP.” But some of the developments you mentioned above, like Search Assist, uses Natural Language Processing technologies. What’s wrong with Natural Language Processing?

I was only joking. Okay, let’s say half-joking.

I like NLP when it is heavily inspired by computational linguistics, where the important word here is “computational.” What I don’t like is a certain old school of NLP that pretends to really understand language and uses heavy semantic networks to encode one vision of the world. It is probably because I don’t think that anyone (human or machine) should define the order of the world. When we were studying the topic 20 years ago, we had to build these monster semantic networks manually. So let’s say that I don’t believe in old fashioned manual NLP, but I am a great believer in NLP systems that do everything automatically.

You’ve said that search technology can have social networking effects. Can you explain that a bit?

We all know that personalization is a key factor in improving search. However, most have explored personalization for a given individual, which can endanger privacy. My colleague Ricardo Baeza-Yates often says that a more intriguing direction is to consider personalization over intent. Indeed, individuals have various facets and interests in their taste, and we should try to personalize around these facets – around common intents over large populations this should bring more insight and allow us to escape stereotypes. As a woman who likes comedy movies, science, and heroic fantasy literature, as well as my local soccer team, I believe that I have heterogeneous tastes and I would hate not getting relevant soccer information simply because the majority of the Haifa soccer team fans are men, or don’t like science, or … you get the point. So, we should be able to discover implicit social relationships over these common intents.

What brought you to Yahoo?

Mostly, I was drawn by the chance to work with the top research talent. The research scientists at Yahoo! simply dominate the research publication world and it is impressive to see the quality and quantity of Yahoo! publications in these forums. I find that Yahoo! researchers are not only leading the way but also sharing their results with the community so as to encourage the next generation of thinkers. Yahoo! is the only company in that space that is brave enough to do this rather than adopting a paranoid approach. This open approach to research is smart, and it will benefit the company in the long term, but you need vision to understand this. In addition, these research scientists are the most humble, modest, and fun people around. There’s not one trace of arrogance, which is really refreshing.

Finally, in addition to the quality of the research people, I see that business-wise Yahoo! is ready to take risks and be a game changer so as to take the first spot in all properties. This is the time to progress aggressively and win over market share when others are only protecting their positions rather than moving forward.

Now that you’ve been around for a little while, what’s the best part of being a Yahoo?

I like the people, the brains, the openness, and the potential to deliver useful content to so many users in so many different properties.

For me, my main priority right now is building a world-class team of research scientists. We have been interviewing a lot, extended a few offers and will have our first new hire join soon. In terms of technical directions, we will still focus on search user experience, which is the forte of the team in Barcelona (with their contributions to SearchPad and Search Assist, and their seminal research in query flow graphs). I am also looking together with Yehuda Koren, who is my first report in Haifa and preceded me here, at new directions for research, as we want to develop an additional area of competency for Haifa. This is being defined as I speak and will be strongly influenced by our first hires as we want this area to be driven by them. We will hopefully have more details in the next few weeks.

- Jessica Hilberman
Yahoo! Search Blog

We’d like to congratulate Vik Singh, an architect at Yahoo!, who has just been picked as one of the MIT’s  Technology Review 35 Young Innovators Under 35 of 2009 for his contributions to Yahoo! Search BOSS.  Since its launch, thousands of developers have issued millions of queries through Yahoo! Search BOSS to power some great, personalized search platforms.

Check out a Q&A and JellyTalk with Vik, where he talks about creative uses of BOSS and future innovations in search.

Congratulations, Vik!

Yahoo! Search Team

Today we welcome Yoelle Maarek to Yahoo! as Senior Director of Yahoo! Research. She will be leading the Yahoo! Lab in Haifa, Israel along with Ronny Lempel. Their teams help further Yahoo!’s commitment to discovering new technologies that deliver compelling experiences on the Web.

You might know Yoelle as the former engineering director at the Google Haifa Engineering Center, which she founded in 2006. Her team launched features such as Google Suggest, Searching Ads, and Interactive Annotations on YouTube. Prior to Google, Yoelle was with IBM Research, where she held series of technical and management positions, first at T.J. Watson Research in New York, and then at the IBM Haifa Research Lab in Israel. You can go to Yoelle’s website to read all about her impressive research experience in information retrieval, Web applications, and collaborative technologies.

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Labs and Yahoo! Search Strategy

The Yahoo! Search Pad relay team ran 200 miles non-stop over a total of 29 hours and 38 minutes from Calistoga to Santa Cruz, CA in The Relay on May 2. The race, which stretched across 36 cities, promotes organ donation through Organs ‘R’ Us.

If you haven’t heard the buzz on Yahoo! Search Pad, check out the demo video that we posted earlier this year. Search Pad automatically collects visited sites and provides simple tools for users to organize and add notes on the sites they find.

At The Relay, the team arrived in the Yahoo! Search Pad van and kept fans connected to the race by Twittering their progress step-by-step. It was a grueling race that involved drizzling and sometimes pouring rain, but we had fun overcoming the challenge as a team while supporting a good cause.

2009 Yahoo! Search Pad 200-mile Relay Team: Joseph Bou-Youne, Dennis Chen, Lawrence Chin, Timothy Daly, Didier Grelin, Ryan Grenier, Thiago Lacerda, Ramana Lokanathan, Monika Mazurkiewicz, Stephen Moore, Shige Takeda, and Ray Trounday.

Thiago Lacerda
Yahoo! Search

I bought a fast Pentium running shiny new Windows 95. I got ISDN. I downloaded each new beta browser. In early 1996, I was hired to build a directory of web sites for one of Yahoo!’s now vanished competitors. I stepped into the fast-moving current, riding wave after wave of discovery, gathering a daily catch of tools and trinkets: image maps, javascripts, dancing widgets, canonical lists of nearly everything. I was getting paid to websurf!

In those days, we studied Yahoo! to see how directory was done. I walked the tree, and pondered colon classification and what it meant that Ranganathan was a Yahoo!. Web search scaled and evolved quickly to colonize the new info landscape, but the algorithms were young, and results were erratic and sometimes surprisingly irrelevant.

Yahoo! hired me on my third try, in 1998. The Web seemed vast, but finite. We still believed there was an end of the Internet. Then, as now, the Yahoo! Directory exemplified the value of informed human intervention, aggregating and organizing the best of the Web, creating choice out of chaos. And Yahoo! was fast, free, and fun, with invisible, reliable, leading-edge technology.

Over the past seven years, it’s been a privilege to participate as Yahoo! and the Web grew up together. Through the tumultuous boom and bust years, search technology thrived. Yahoo! enjoyed a succession of relationships with great search providers. Then, more recently, we reinvented ourselves and launched Yahoo! Search Technology.

These days, search engine is a household word. The power of search has captured the public imagination and become essential in the lives of millions. And though we’re continually innovating, we’ve just begun to explore the multi-faceted, multimedia knowledge exchange that becomes possible when search technologies mature and get smarter. Stay tuned.

And now it’s time to celebrate. You’re invited to Yahoo!’s 10th birthday party. There’s even a present waiting for you there. Feeling nostalgic? Don’t miss our amazing, entertaining web installation, Netrospective: 10 years, 100 moments of the Web. We’d love to hear from you.

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Editorial

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You could never say that Reiner Kraft lacks vision or inspiration.
This unassuming guy with the soft voice and thick German accent comes
up with ideas–and incredibly viable ones–the way Snoop Dog flows
lyrics.

Reiner’s recent brainchild, Y!Q was launched in beta last week. Based on his concept of
“disruptive distribution” technology, he believes it will
significantly change the face of search.

Here’s what Reiner had to say about his passion for search innovation
and what it means to provide information “at the point of
inspiration.”

Q: You’ve coined this phrase “disruptive distribution”
technology and you use it a lot when talking about Y!Q. What exactly
is it?

A: It’s a mechanism for distributing search boxes all over
the Internet. As it relates to Y!Q, it’s an API for webmasters that
lets them insert icons within their content so that their readers can
access related information about that content without having to leave
their page.

Q: So the distributive part makes sense. Why
“disruptive?”

A: Because it changes, or potentially changes, the way
people search. Rather than having to go to a special page to perform
a search, a search box is always a click away. You don’t even have to
type in a query. You can, if you want to refine your search further,
but really it’s optional.

Q: How does all this roll into Y!Q?

A: The key to Y!Q is the idea of contextual search or
relevant “information at the point of inspiration.” People liked
to use that phrase before but with Y!Q it’s becoming a reality. The
idea is that there is always a context to what a user is reading or
working on. So if they want to do a search, that search will be
related to it somehow.

With Y!Q, we’re able to identify what that context is and provide
search boxes right where you need them. Then a user can dig deeper
and ask more questions without interrupting their workflow.

Then of course, there’s the API that the content owners or
webmasters can use to integrate Y!Q into their pages. Now their
readers can click on the Y!Q icons and automatically find more
information about a subject. So in this case, the user isn’t
specifying the context, the content provider tells us, “this is the
piece” that the user is interested in. It works as fine as when
the user selected the context themselves.

Q: I like that it’s the user can specify what they want.
That’s probably appealing to a lot of people.

A: Right. The other thing is that if we tried to
automatically identify the context, we’d never get it 100% right.
We’d just be guessing. But because the user says, “this is the
piece of information I’m interested in,” Y!Q can get the context
right on the first try.

What’s happening is the information they’ve highlighted gets
transmitted to our search where our algorithms extract the key
concepts and give them relevant results back.

Q: This question was posted by a blogger who thinks content
publishers could use the Y!Q icons to help generate ad revenue. He
asks, “Are there any plans to add contextual advertising to
Y!Q?”

A: That’s an interesting proposition. Y!Q is a new beta
product and we’re planning a lot of enhancements; but first and
foremost we’re focusing on giving publishers more control over the
display and content in Y!Q. As we develop new features, we’ll make
sure to post them on the blog.

Q: Another blogger asks, “do you think Y!Q will phase out
once the novelty factor wears off?” and “do you think it’ll be used as
a serious search solution by working professionals, [not] just cool
kid teens?”

A: Y!Q was designed to address two key issues: First, we
want to provide convenient access to search functionality at the point
of inspiration. Second, we want to push relevant and enhanced results
related to the context and provide superior relevancy for search
results. If we’re doing a good job for one and two, I think Y!Q has a
very good chance of being adapted and used widely. Users generally use
the search tool that is easiest to use and produces the best
results. So I believe that Y!Q will be gradually accepted as the next
generation search tool of choice.

For the second question: I already use Y!Q as my default search
engine in Firefox, and it produces more relevant results compared to
other plug-ins. Therefore anybody can use it as a default search tool.
I don’t think there is a preferred audience.

Q: Tell me a bit about your patents. You actually have one
hundred?

A: I don’t know the exact number. I filed probably over 100,
and so far on the order of 40 have been issued. It typically takes
about 2-4 years for patents to issue, so they’re coming all in
gradually.

Q: Wow.

A: That was mostly between the time of ‘98 and around 2001
maybe.

Q: Are they all related to search technology?

A: No. A lot of them are, but there are many others that are related to different type of Web technologies, for example e-commerce or location awareness technologies. Especially the latter ones may become more important soon once GPS devices [e.g., cell phones] appear on the market and become more broadly used.

Q: Aren’t you also finishing up your thesis?

A: Yes, it’s about domain specific search and is based on what I call iterative filtering meta search. The idea is to leverage the search engine infrastructures to create a filtering mechanism that automatically helps you get documents for a specialized information need. For instance, we built a buying guide finder that helps you to find just buying guides.

Q: If I hadn’t checked out your website , I’d think that everything you do revolves around relevancy and search! A lot of people at Yahoo! don’t know that you were part of a German band and that you’ve composed over 30 rock songs. How do define yourself first; composer or inventor?

A: (laughs) I just like to think about new ideas. So to me, it’s all the same thing. You create some music piece or you create some ideas or some algorithms to do something. It doesn’t have to be specific to search but ideas related to web technologies in a broad sense.

Q: What’s the biggest satisfaction for you in working in Yahoo! Search?

A: I think the satisfaction at the end of the day is that you’ve invented something that you think is cool and useful and people are able to use it and it helps them simplify things. That’s particularly true with the Y!Q project. I think it could be a new paradigm for how user’s search. Hopefully if people like it and use it a lot, it’ll become the default method for how we search. If that could be achieved, then of course that’s kind of a nice thing. You’ve had some impact essentially–you’ve developed something people will use now and years to come.

Yvette Irvin
Y! Profiler

Yvette Irvin
Y! Profiler