Archive for July, 2005

Yahoo == IR talent magnet | The tip of the iceberg

Posted by martin in Search on July 28th, 2005

Article in NY Times today, Yahoo is wooing I.B.M. Technical Talent:

Yahoo plans to announce Thursday that it is recruiting scientists who pioneered an advanced search-engine technology at I.B.M.’s Silicon Valley research laboratory.
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Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist who once led the Clever effort, joined Yahoo last week as head of research. He left I.B.M. in 2000 to become a vice president and chief scientist at Verity Inc., a maker of search and retrieval software for corporations; he was later named chief technical officer.
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Yahoo offers one of the best opportunities to explore new ideas in search, Mr. Raghavan said
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One area that will be pursued is new search technologies related to digital media.

It’s been fun to watch Google being forced from the position of category killer to more-or-less evenly matched contestant over the last year or two. There’s a mind-boggling amount of innovation happening in search, which is levelling the playing field for new entrants, but even the stuff we’re seeing now is only the beginning. Search, and other modes of information retrieval, will become even more ubiquitous and integrated than they are now, and we’ll wonder how an OS like Windows without integrated search ever came to dominate a market. The desktop market itself may go away (yes, I’ve been reading Paul Graham’s book Hackers and Painters, which contains this great essay on server-based software from 2001, which is still relevant and engaging, as are his many other essays).

Search is poised to become the great collective memory, and new research being brought to market in real services, along with the availability of public APIs, will speed progress toward that reality. But it won’t be just the extent of information covered by search that will grow, but also interconnectivity of seach services and, most importantly, new modes of retrieving information (the only mode now in widespread use is keyword search, which is as old computer science itself — or much older, if you count manual versions such as file cabinets and card catalogs and other manually compiled indexes). I don’t see any reason why search shouldn’t aim to duplicate in software all of the modes in which humans retrieve information in their own brains (by context, by association and so on) or from others, by interactive question answering or guided discovery.

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Yahoo! briefly launches … Feedsterati?

Posted by martin in Blogosphere, Search on July 8th, 2005

Steve Rubel and Niall Kennedy are reporting on a Yahoo RSS search service which was briefly public this morning. Seems to combine feed search (not just blogs, apparently, but other feed content, too, like Feedster) and several ranking options (date, relevance, and popularity). I’m curious about the popularity ranking, but I’d guess the initial version will resemble a Technorati-like tally of incoming-links.

Greg Linden wonders whether the small blog/feed search engines will survive the entry of the giants into the field:

… it is good for a startup to see the entry of a big company into its area since it attracts attention and legitimizes the field … but competing directly against these giants is scary if you have no differentiator.

While the small players have driven innovation and broad acceptance of concepts like link popularity and tagging, they continue to struggle with scalability. Also, the most compelling products to come out of the blog search startups, while they’ve been exciting and even revolutionary from a user’s point of view, have not been technologically deep in the sense of difficult to duplicate by the search giants. There have been exceptions, of course, but no really deep technology is in evidence among those services that have made the biggest splashes (technorati, bloglines, flickr, del.icio.us).

So, when a search giant comes in with equal-or-better features, scalability, and a huge engineering team that can relatively quickly merge ideas emerging from the programming part of the blogosphere into the vast search toolkit that the giants already have, that might just cast a bit of a cloud over the little guys.

Having said that, I believe there will continue to be a place for the little guys in the blog search ecosystem. They’re the real innovators and they have their ears to the ground. And even at the break-neck speed at which Yahoo and Google have been rolling out features lately, an army of little guys can still cover a lot more ground than the two giants in the search for the next cool thing that will make users’ lives (even) better.

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Whither Tagging?

Posted by martin in Blogosphere on July 5th, 2005

Susan Mernit asks some interesting questions about tagging’s scalability in this post:

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1. How well will tagging work as an organizing and information retrieval method when there are millions of tags?–That’s where having additional filters, such as identity, trust or cohort group becomes relevant–becomes needed.

2. How can developers move tagging into a wider market? I describe tagging to non-geek friends and they are interested, but these folks aren’t blogging, don’t use tag-friendly photo services and are a world away, still–how can the tools bring them closer?
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I don’t think that tagging will turn out to be the emperor’s new clothes (which isn’t at all what Susan is suggesting, either). But there’s a sense here that the honeymoon is over and it’s time for tagging to get serious about earning its keep for readers and searchers and to make stuff not just more broadcastable in flickr and Technorati, but also to make the good stuff more findable.

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Yahoo: linked blogs != searched blogs

Posted by martin in Blogosphere on July 5th, 2005

Interesting informal experiment in the Yahoo! Buzz Log:

Do you find blogs via links or through search? We wanted to know, so we lined up the top 20 blogs in the blogosphere according to Technorati … we did peek at the number of searches each received over the last week.
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Turns out the lead blog on Technorati runs in the middle of the search pack. Fark ranked #5 on Technorati, but in terms of searches — it’s the top dog, er, blog.

Note that Yahoo! restricted its sample set to the top 20 blogs according to Technorati, so if all blogs were lined up according to search popularity on Yahoo, the top 20 might or might not include any of the Technorati top 20.

So, what’s this mean? It means that searches map to a different popularity ranking than links do. They’re two different measures. Technorati takes a sort of intra-blogosphere measurement of popularity, while Yahoo! is taking an external measurement of blog popularity, looking into the blogosphere from the web at large (or at least from search.yahoo.com). If you’re a marketer, you probably like Yahoo’s measurement better.

(via Steve Rubel)

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