I was at the tumblr search meetup a few weeks ago in nyc. tumblr search is basically cached solr over bounded data sets, like most popular, last 6 weeks, etc.
This could be a great move. Google has moved focus on its search to advertising.
When searching "Hotels in San Francisco", the first organic search term is below the fold for me, which is a 180 from where Google was even 3 years ago.
Google Hotel Finder pulls prices now for hotels from lots of sites which allows you to get more information than you could have before by clicking out to various organic links which seems to be a better user experience to me regardless of whether Google gets paid or not.
When searching for "Hotels in San Francisco", you are almost certainly looking to spend some money at a hotel in San Francisco. The most relevant results ARE ads.
Weird. I did the "hotels in San Francisco" search, and I got that semi-annoying little ribbon at the top of the page listing a bunch of hotels in San Francisco.
I decided to play with it a bit, and selected the filter "4 stars or better", and it came up with an empty set.
I thought well, that's weird. Surely there are 4 star hotels in San Francisco!
So I kept trying to figure out what had gone wrong. It turns out the little ribbon is actually showing you results from the map that's down and to the right.
That's kind of cool, but there's no UI cues indicating that connection at all. Strange to see something so clumsy on a Google search page.
Is DDG really that much of a name brand outside nerd circles? Maybe I just have weird friends, but almost no one I know IRL has ever heard of DDG, while quite a few have heard and used Bing.
I think Yahoo will buy Bing within 3 months after MSFT brings in the new CEO. MSFT will be more focused on the enterprise market and Yahoo will use Bing to fight google.
Search is really really hard to do, isn't it? I mean there aren't that many search engines, and even more prominent "alternative" engines (like DuckDuckGo) are often pulling results from Google and/or Bing...both of which have made fairly gargantuan investments in the technology and infrastructure behind their search engines.
Could there be some other technical genius way of doing it? Well...I'm sure there is, but would Yahoo really have the in-house talent to discover it before Google or Bing (or another wealthy potential Search entrant like Apple or Facebook)?
Sure, Marissa has been buying up talent, but that has primarily been mobile devs...
What I am sad about is there are no search engines that can return pure search results. The results you get are now tainted by DCMA takedown notices, censorship, and other various legal mechanisms.
Presumably there are specific domain names which do not respond to DMCA requests, while the search engines do. The others would respond to DMCA requests and thus results for them would be useless/dead. A project could aim to index these DMCA proof domains specifically?
I don't have a problem with the DMCA but I believe using it to censor a list of links is abuse and breaks the US's first amendment.
You are assuming their search has to be very good. Would it make a difference if the search was merely good enough. Search engines will generally get the most popular stuff well enough (eg "Justin Bieber") and it is the longer tail where they distinguish themselves. But does Yahoo need to distinguish themselves there?
Google became popular because of their excellent performance on the long tail. Yes ~30% of all queries are for the same 50 search terms, but 50% are unique or nearly unique queries.
I'm developing buzzsumo.com, which focuses on searching for fresh content on a topic.
So when you search for "startups", you don't get official sites about startups, but rather the most popular stories about startups that's being shared the most.
Is anyone else kind of rooting for Yahoo? I can't really explain why, because I hate most of the things Yahoo makes: Yahoo Answers, Tumblr, etc. but I guess I can't help cheering for the underdog.
The cynics will view Marrissa Meyer as a Google Trojan horse. I think its good to see some healthy competition in the internet portal space, especially as Google.com transitions from a search engine to a scraped content publisher serving advertisements.
Perhaps a lot of us also remember Yahoo as one of our first world wide web destination sites in the 1990s, so even if we don't care for the site today, we aren't cheering for its demise. They had bad leadership for a long time, their webmail saved their asses, and now there is a shot Yahoo could be around for another decade.
It'll be very interesting to see if she can manage to get out of the deal. It'd also take a monumental effort in recruitment and research to make a move like this a success, in my opinion anyway.
This is an interesting idea - Yandex isn't great in English but I'd guess with time they could get there if they focused, their raw tech is probably superior to Bing and they've been working on the problem for a long time.
Have not checked out Yandex in awhile. Seems like they are up to some interesting stuff: http://beta.yandex.com/ (Wish I could read the webpages in the video though)
That's interesting because I have never thought of Yahoo as a search engine. When I first encountered Yahoo, it was really nothing more than a curated directory of links. As soon as I discovered Google, I left it and never looked back.
Seriously, can she bring back the old/stable yahoo mail back first?
The new my-yahoo page is no better, been a yahoo user for 10+ years suddenly the yahoo services becomes so much worse since she became CEO.
sigh.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 87.5 ms ] threadThat should provide some boost, but I wonder if it's considered in the market share statistics.
Or at least it _seems_ so.
When searching "Hotels in San Francisco", the first organic search term is below the fold for me, which is a 180 from where Google was even 3 years ago.
The same thing shows up for "Restaurants in X," "Museums in X," and the like.
Just curious what kind of results you are expecting.
I decided to play with it a bit, and selected the filter "4 stars or better", and it came up with an empty set.
I thought well, that's weird. Surely there are 4 star hotels in San Francisco!
So I kept trying to figure out what had gone wrong. It turns out the little ribbon is actually showing you results from the map that's down and to the right.
That's kind of cool, but there's no UI cues indicating that connection at all. Strange to see something so clumsy on a Google search page.
Could there be some other technical genius way of doing it? Well...I'm sure there is, but would Yahoo really have the in-house talent to discover it before Google or Bing (or another wealthy potential Search entrant like Apple or Facebook)?
Sure, Marissa has been buying up talent, but that has primarily been mobile devs...
I don't have a problem with the DMCA but I believe using it to censor a list of links is abuse and breaks the US's first amendment.
So when you search for "startups", you don't get official sites about startups, but rather the most popular stories about startups that's being shared the most.
Yeah, you're not the only one kind of rooting for Yahoo.
If anything this just strengthens why I wouldn't root for yahoo.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page
Hell hath no fury...
Perhaps a lot of us also remember Yahoo as one of our first world wide web destination sites in the 1990s, so even if we don't care for the site today, we aren't cheering for its demise. They had bad leadership for a long time, their webmail saved their asses, and now there is a shot Yahoo could be around for another decade.
What exactly does Yahoo do these days? Mayer seems to be repeating history with her goings on at Yahoo.
I would love for someone to turn Yahoo around but I don't think it is possible. Might be time to sell to Microsoft.