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

Vik Singh, architect of the Yahoo! Search BOSS team, is the brains behind the BOSS Mashup Framework. Since last summer, he has built many sample apps using the framework. Most recently Vik released an informal mashup (not an official Yahoo! product) called TweetNews, which fuses Yahoo! News with the Twitter API to provide a new ranking model for breaking news queries. Vik took some time to answer our questions about his new application, creative uses of BOSS, and future innovations in search.

Yahoo! (Y!): What’s TweetNews and how does it work?

Vik Singh (VS): TweetNews is a mashup that reorders Yahoo!’s latest news search results based on how popular they are in Twitter. For example, if you search ‘iPhone’ on TweetNews, the service queries BOSS for the latest news results on the ‘iPhone’ and fetches the latest Twitter comments on ‘iPhone’ via Twitter’s API. The service computes how many of these Twitter messages relate to each Yahoo! news result by looking at how much textual overlap there is, then displays the news results re-ranked based on their number of related Twitter messages. Basically this service uses Twitter to determine authority for content that is so fresh it doesn’t have links yet.

Y!: Why did you build it? And what does it demonstrate about what’s possible with BOSS?

VS: One emerging area of search that I think no one has really solved is real-time authoritative search. When breaking news happens (like the Mumbai bombing, Hudson River plane crash, or wildfires), it’s difficult for traditional news sources to discover and prioritize all the information in a timely fashion. It can take several minutes or hours for traditional media to converge on the important stories. However, new social media outlets like Twitter are breaking these important stories faster than traditional media. By looking at the number of users chatting about these topics, one can measure the future newsworthiness of a very fresh story despite its potentially minimal traditional news coverage at that moment.

Although Twitter can be used to discover and rank content, it’s not necessarily the best place to get in-depth, factual information since Twitter messages are very short and unverified. This service ranks actual news stories which provide integrity and in-depth coverage while using Twitter as a signal for ranking. A couple of days ago I searched ‘tweetnews’ on TweetNews and underneath the top result, one of the related Twitter messages described the service as: “The reliability of news with the speed of Twitter.” That pretty much sums up the value proposition of this idea.

I think overall the service was well-received. The traffic filled up my allowed server quotas in minutes. It was quite an honor to read that Wired thought it was the best mashup they’ve ever seen. This idea shows that there are still inefficiencies in search, and that with BOSS, anyone can go out and solve them. All the code and tools I used are open source. It took a little less than 100 lines of code to represent all the search logic, thanks to BOSS. This application couldn’t exist pre-BOSS. Going from nothing to a 100-line search engine is a pretty big advancement!

Y!: What are your thoughts on publicly releasing mashups versus fully “productizing” new ideas before releasing them?

VS: It depends on the idea, but I find that sometimes releasing “quick and dirty” to the world is a great way to test a proof of concept with a real audience. Many ideas that are easy to prototype and test with real users instead go straight through the expensive and slow productization process only to be a dud when they go out to market. In this particular case, releasing TweetNews as a more open third-party mashup provided us invaluable feedback on the idea and empowered our BOSS developer community with more source code and search design patterns.

Y!: Any examples of mashups or search products built using BOSS that you think show potential?

VS: I really like Trogdor, OneRiot, PostRank, InsiderFood, and BuildaSearch, to name just a few. Trogdor saves the users time because they don’t have to press enter or refresh the page; it automatically updates your search results while you type. OneRiot and PostRank aim to solve the social freshness issues that TweetNews highlighted but employ other sophisticated ranking techniques. InsiderFood provides a new user experience for discovering and searching international cuisine.

I like BuildaSearch because it lets anyone build a search engine using BOSS without having to write a single line of code. A user just goes to their site, picks some colors and favorite URLs, and voila, BuildaSearch generates a search engine. I also like many others that have been linked to on this blog.

Y!: Where do you see the most potential for innovation in search?

VS: Blending and personalization of vertical and web search results – I believe vertical search (shopping, local, auctions, news, social) provides invaluable, unique results from what we typically find in Web search. However, users need to learn to pick and choose from multiple search engines based on their query and intent. Wouldn’t it be nice to skip this step and do this automatically for the user? Can we be smart enough to know which search engine is best for that query, and if we’re not exactly sure, can we blend results together from the best verticals and personalize the experience and ranking for the user? I believe every search engine a user encounters should be totally comprehensive, relevant, and personalized based on which site the user is searching from. I strongly believe BOSS can help sites build this new wave of search experiences.

Dr. Rudi Studer is no stranger to the world of semantic search. A full professor in Applied Informatics at University of Karlsruhe, Dr. Studer is also director of the Karlsruhe Service Research Institute, an interdisciplinary center designed to spur new concepts and technologies for a services-based economy. His areas of research include ontology management, semantic web services, and knowledge management. He has been a past president of the Semantic Web Science Association and has served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Web Semantics.

In addition to his duties as director of the KSRI, Dr. Studer is a vice president for Semantic Technologies Institute International and helped found ontoprise GmbH, an enterprise software company built around deploying semantic technologies. Dr. Studer recently gave a talk at Yahoo! about semantic technologies, and he was kind enough to answer a set of follow-up questions about the future of semantic search.

Yahoo! (Y!): Could you please tell us about your research on semantic search at the University of Karlsruhe?

Rudi Studer (RS): We look at semantic search as a process of information access, where one or several activities can be supported by semantic technologies. These activities include preprocessing and extraction of information, the interpretation of user information needs, the actual query processing, the presentation of results, and finally, the processing of user feedback for subsequent queries and to generate improved refinements. In all of these steps, semantic technologies can be exploited. For example, with respect to interpreting user information needs, we work on techniques to automatically translate information needs, expressed in either natural language queries or keyword-based queries, into expressive queries that are specified in structured query languages, such as SPARQL.

Y!: Early on, semantic technologies drew criticism for overestimating their own short-term impact and failing to embrace some of the realities of the Web. In what ways do you think the semantic web community has matured since then?

RS: It’s true that in the Semantic Web community a lot of emphasis has been put on Semantics rather than on Web aspects. But, important to note, semantic technologies are not only about the Web. Many of these technologies, e.g. in the context of Enterprise Information Integration, were indeed successful in closed and controlled environments. Now, we’re beginning to see that these technologies are more and more applied to open Web environments, as well.

Of course there have also been many developments that focus on Web aspects in particular. In the context of combining Web 2.0 and Semantic Web technologies, we see that the Web is the central point. In terms of short term impact, Web 2.0 has clearly passed the Semantic Web, but in the long run there is a lot that Semantic Web technologies can contribute. We see especially promising advancements in developing and deploying lightweight semantic approaches.

Y!: In principle, semantic technologies should be able to help search engines more precisely match the user’s intent with the content on the page. But again, this has proven to be harder to realize than originally expected. Are we getting closer to the solution?

RS: No one ever said that it was going to be easy! But yes, we are getting closer. As I indicated before, many of the technologies today work well in closed environments (e.g. Enterprise scenarios), but do not necessarily scale to the Web (yet). But of course there is improvement on that side as well. Powerset (acquired by Microsoft this year), for example, is a good indicator of where we’re headed and certainly a proof point that we’re getting closer.

Y!: The semantic web suffers from a chicken-and-egg problem, where developers are unwilling to create applications due to a lack of metadata, and publishers are unwilling to expose metadata due to a lack of applications. What are some of the ways to break out of this deadlock?

RS: There are two solutions to this: First, we need to make it easier for publishers to produce semantic metadata and second, we need to make the benefits more obvious for the application developers.

With regard to the first aspect, a lot of the data is already available in structured form (e.g. in databases of the deep web), and technically straight-forward to expose in the form of RDF. The Open Linked Data Initiative is a good example of large numbers of data sources that have been published as RDF data. Then there is the unstructured data. Technologies like semantic wikis (e.g. the Semantic MediaWiki) allow the easy and seamless construction of semantic metadata as the content is produced.

The benefits of semantic metadata are becoming more and more obvious. At this year’s ISWC the Billion Triple Challenge uncovered a number of useful applications that show the benefits of combining existing Semantic Web data sources in an intelligent way.

Y!: How do you think major search engines supporting semantic technologies might contribute to the growth of the semantic web?

RS: Once search engines index Semantic Web data, the benefits will be even more obvious and immediate to the end user. Yahoo!’s SearchMonkey is a good example of this. In turn, if there is a benefit for the end user, content providers will make their data available using Semantic Web standards.

Y!: What do you think are some of the commercial opportunities left to be explored by semantic technologies?

RS: So far, semantic technologies have been used in commercial products for data integration, enterprise semantic search and content management, etc. I expect this area to grow, but prospectively I see more and more potential for business opportunities in the combination of the social web and semantic technologies as well as in the context of mashups. An area that is also still largely unexplored is the area of advertisements in the context of semantic search.

Y!: What are some of the pitfalls that developers run into when they first start investigating or deploying semantic metadata?

RS: One problem in the early days was that the tool support was not as mature as for other technologies. This has changed over the years as we now have stable tooling infrastructure available. This also becomes apparent when looking at the at this year’s Semantic Web Challenge.

Another aspect is the complexity of some of the technologies. For example, understanding the foundation of languages such as OWL (being based on Description Logics) is not trivial. At the same time, doing useful stuff does not require being an expert in Logics – many things can already be done exploiting only a small subset of all the language features.

Y!: If you’re a front-end developer who’s interested in finding out more about semantic metadata, where should you get started?

RS: There are now numerous books out there, e.g. Antoniou/van Harmelen: A Semantic Web Primer, Davies et al. (eds.): Semantic Web Technologies, and Staab/Studer (eds.): Handbook on Ontologies. There is also a large collection of video lectures at videolectures.net.

Of course the W3C recommendations for RDF, OWL and SPARQL are a useful reference. For inspiration, I recommend looking at some of the sites exploiting semantic technologies, e.g. semanticweb.org, Twine, or Freebase.

Earlier this week, we spent some time catching up with
Adrienne Bassett, an interaction designer on the Yahoo! Search team. Adrienne
was one of five Yahoos that recently took a leave of absence to redesign the href="http://one.org/">ONE.org website, the online arm of the ONE campaign,
an organization founded by U2’s Bono that’s fighting global poverty and AIDS.

This project was the latest focus of the “ href="http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=201033">Yahoo!
for Good Scrum” initiative, an internal program that allows Yahoo!
employees to take time off from their typical day jobs to apply their technical
talents to projects with a social mission.

We asked Adrienne to share her experience working behind the
scenes on this project.

Enjoy!

Adrienne, what exactly is a Scrum?

A scrum is basically a small team of people working on a
project that’s accomplished in short, concentrated bursts of activity with very
specific goals. They can be pretty intense, although the ONE.org project was
technically more like a charrette
or a hack day,
our team was working on a combination of design, usability and functionality
problems all at once.

What was the team trying to accomplish with the redesign?

The ONE campaign is all about how people can incite change,
one by one, to fight AIDS and poverty. The campaign has a huge global
community of supporters, but it wasn’t very visible with the previous website.
Our goal was to change that, to capture and infuse community back into
ONE.org. Also, to use the site for creating and growing awareness of the ONE
campaign.

What were some of the ways that the team “infused community” into ONE.org?

Something we learned fairly quickly was that ONE campaign
communities were already forming and thriving online, so part of our
challenge was simply aggregating, organizing and supporting these
communities via the ONE.org site. I’ll give you a few examples:

Several ad hoc Yahoo!
Groups have formed around the campaign in the last two years, with
the new site, we’re now showcasing these groups for supporters that
might not have otherwise known about them, we’re also providing
easy-to-use tools and resources to encourage new group forming at a
local level. ONE Groups are now surfacing in cities across the U.S.
In fact we’re using the href="http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/">Yahoo! Maps API to capture
and track this growth via the “Where is
One” page.

Another good example is the “Who
is One” module on the front page. Often you see lists of names of people
who have pledged their support for a cause, ONE.org has this too, but we wanted
to take things a step further and enable people to share their faces as well.
The Who is One module is a living and
breathing photo mosaic of the people behind the ONE campaign. I think it adds
an interesting dimension to the site. People are no longer just names on a
list. You can see them. They can see you. It visually humanizes the campaign
in a powerful new way.

There are several other examples I could point to, ranging
from ways we’ve incorporated community education and learning via href="http://answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=20060706201547AAy10c8&pa">Yahoo!
Answers, to a customized ONE
toolbar, we’ve even created virtual ONE
tees for people’s Yahoo! avatars.

Tell us more about those avatar tees…

I think for the same reason people wear the href="http://store.one.org/donate.aspx">white ONE wristbands in the real
world as a sign of support, the avatar t-shirts are a way for people to share
their support on the web. It’s also simply a unique way to get people talking
and connecting with each based on common interests.

Now you took three months off from your day job to work on this project. How tough was that?

At first it was difficult, leaving my team wasn’t easy, but they
were all very supportive which helped. As luck would have it, I was
also between projects when this opportunity surfaced, so it was good
timing for me. I’ve been with Yahoo! for a little over five years
now, and it was a good chance for me to detach from my typical
assignments, to wear a different hat and to work with a different
purpose.

How did you get this entire project done in three months!?

We had an amazing team of people working on this project –
all day, everyday — each of us with a unique skill set. It wasn’t a big team,
I was only one of five, but we shared a collective interest and passion for
this project that was clear from the get-go. I also have to thank folks like
Meg Garlinghouse and Geoff Ralston who were incredibly supportive and gave us
very valuable feedback and guidance along the way.

Were there any significant challenges you had to overcome?

You mean other than getting this project from start to
finish in three months!? Yeah, we hit a few bumps, nothing too significant, I
think our biggest challenge had to do with ways we could balance user-created
content, like comments, photos, etc., with some reasonable backend controls for
moderation. There’s a degree of risk the ONE.org website had to accept by
enabling communities to connect and express their opinions and feelings freely
via the site, our team tried to mitigate this risk by building and baking in
some simple controls.

What would consider your big personal takeaway, now that it’s complete?

I certainly feel invested (emotionally) in the ONE campaign,
I feel pride with what we’ve accomplished, I’ll continue to do as much as I can
to support it. I also walk away with gratitude toward Yahoo! and my team for
giving me the freedom and flexibility to work on such a cool assignment, I’m
looking forward to returning and digging back into things.

I don’t think anyone on our team will forget this experience. It
was good for the mind and soul.

Yahoo! incorporated in 1995, the year I discovered the World Wide Web. That year, I made a decision that changed my life: I dared myself to use the Web to find a job on the Internet. I was a natural-born information junkie who could read, write, edit, and catalog–and fearlessly follow hyperlinks wherever they might lead.

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

And speaking of Reiner Kraft, I’ll be sitting down with him shortly to talk about his take on everything from Y!Q to German rock bands. If you have anything you’d like me to ask him, just post it below.

Yvette Irvin
Y! Profiler