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Yahoo! Research Labs
glinden writes "Yahoo! issued a press release today announcing their creation of Yahoo! Research Labs. Although there's not much there yet, it's clearly targeting Google and Google Labs. The battle between MSN, Yahoo, and Google in the "Year of Search" is heating up. And it's still only January."
I'm serious-- I'd just like to know if Yahoo has any record of invention.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
I've always wanted to know about Betting Boolean-Style: A Framework for Trading in Securities Based on Logical Formulas
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Search Engines and portals are our internet starting points; we can't just magically pull information out of our asses. When you're fighting to become that starting point, you're fight much the same battle as news stations do. And we know how fiesty journalists are.
There's been an ongoing project going for years to build a massive heuristics database (I can't remember the damn name of it now, something like Cync). The heuristics are rules about the world, "truths" if you like, for instance, "water is wet", "sugar is sweet", etc). I would love to see what would happen when you made a search engine which used this massive heuristics database. Even better, let the search engine derive further truths from the pages it searches.
Go to http://labs.yahoo.com
Click on the "Research", then the "Open Source Search", and then the "Staff" tab.
Notice the URL now says:
http://research.overture.com/staff.xml
Now, I'm not sure whether the two sites, research.overture.com and labs.yahoo.com were launched at the same time. There's no Netcraft record for research.overture.com (at least, there wasn't when I last checked it), so I couldn't get an uptime or anything of that nature.
But considering that the URL changes halfway through while you're browsing through the site, it leaves me to believe this was a fast hatchet job of getting something, anything out of the door to compete with Google, now that Yahoo is severing its ties with the search engine.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
The only thing Google has going for it is the page ranking mechanism. If you take the time to look through Google Labs, you will see that there is very little stuff there that is actually useful. Fun, yes. Very useful to a very small minority of people, sometimes. But very little Google does actually generates revenue whereas Yahoo! has a well-established online supra-portal that generates revenue through a wide range of method, from banner ads to pay services.
Once Yahoo! starts producing useful products from their research in Yahoo! labs, they will show that not only is Google Labs a complete waste of time and money (Google's money that is) but it does not generate revenue to support its existence.
Open Source Search
Remember the early Linux days -- when code contributions and discussion forums were one in the same? What if web search harvested the global treasure store for sharing the advancements in retrieval, indexing, ranking, disambiguation, communities, profiling, presentation...imagine what could be. Lend your support (we did) by keeping tabs on this project.
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Mark Twain
The best search engine would be a friendly artifiical intelligence (FAI) that mimicked your state of mind in searching for exactly what you need and want.
Friendly AI is poised to co-evolve with human beings and search out the optimal future for man and 'borg in Joint Stewardship of Earth.
The Poor Man's AI Lab will go up against MIT, Google Labs and the Yahoo! Reseach Labs anytime in real-time AI research.
AI4U -- the leading alternative AI Textbook -- should be required reading at the Yahoo! Research Labs.
I'd give it a while to see if it's a real research lab. I've seen a large number of tech companies form "research labs" that are basically engineering products for a year or two down the line. I've interacted with one .com where the entire software development team was called a research lab.
A traditional research lab focuses on basic research, with occasional industry applications coming out. Examples of this include IBM TJ Watson Research Center, Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, (surprisingly) Microsoft Research, as well as most acadamic labs. These have the property that many projects have no applications for as much as 20+ years, but they are critical to long-term economic growth, and most importantly, they are fun to work at. As a result, they have a very easy time recruiting good people, and for all the economic loss on "basic research projects," generate some very cool stuff otherwise.
Right now, although I'm not sure how much fundamental research Google does, it does require employees to spend 20% of their time on personal pet projects, which encourages a lot of creativity. They are a very fun employer, and at least looking at MIT AI Lab and Stanford, Google seems to pick of the cream-of-the-crop from PhDs not going into acadamia. Yahoo, on the other hand, has the army-of-moron-developers models.
If Yahoo, on the other hand, starts a search engine development team, and calls it "Yahoo Labs," I will be unimpressed. However, from the press release, it is entirely unclear what form the lab will take, but from the phrases in the press release ("strategic projects," "short-term projects," "work collaboratively with Yahoo! business"), I am inclined to think it'll be the software development team called a research lab, rather a real research lab.
A lot of Overture guys, many of whom I have personally worked with at idealab and elsewhere. These are *good* guys, people. I don't know if yahoo intends for them to do anything super cool or not, but the folks writing code can pretty much do anything.