Slashdot Mirror
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."
"Yahoo Labs"... there's got to be a Farside cartoon in there somewhere.
Trolling is a art,
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 think Google have the advantage of the better name. With 'Yahoo Research Labs', I have this image of a load of cowboys wearing white research coats.
I! refuse! to! take! them! seriously! until! they! obey! the! same! punctuation! rules! as! everyone! else!
These sigs are more interesting tha
Google kicks everybody else's a$$ at one thing: Search results. Now when everyone else is getting more serious about search, (Yahoo buying Overture, Microsoft announcing Search R&D), Google announces Google mail. I am not sure if this is the way to go.
Lately, (and I'm sure lot of you have noticed) Google's search results have been a little more oriented towards commercial sites. Not good. They should apply the KISS principle.
I love Google (like billion other people) and it will be sad if going public and eventually catering to stockholders starts a downward spiral.
Free XBox, PS2
Just cause Google is currently the leader doesnt mean Yahoo doesnt deserve the chance to take the crown!
Would you prefer technology stagnate?
Good luck to the teams at both google and yahoo!
I dont believe in brand loyalty. Cause no company has believed in customer loyalty.
I've always wanted to know about Betting Boolean-Style: A Framework for Trading in Securities Based on Logical Formulas
Rus
CPanel + Root from $35/mo - 10% off with discount code SLASHDOT
Yup, it's January - thank God *something* is finally heating up!
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
Anyone else think the disruption is a bit out of place in their motto?
All of the "success stories" they list on the site are related to target web advertising, so yes, "disruption" is indeed related to what they do.
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
Yahoo has a long ways to go. Aquiring geocities was the last smart thing yahoo did. (that and beefing up my email quota for free) Google has made a lot of news lately about how they try to be non-intrusive as a search engine and try to make it quick, simple, and have relevent search results instead of 10 advertisements and then a real search result. Until yahoo can do something really gripping I'll keep using Google for search engine. If yahoo is smart they will keep focused on thier "community" appeal. They are friggen awsome and community even if that community is the redlight district for teens. With that... I miss the old Geocities. I also miss Altavista (powered by digital) in its prime. /rant off
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
I know that my father for one prefers yahoo!. When I try and make him use google by setting it as the homepage, he complains that it takes forever to load.
::sigh::
``Dad, it's done loading.''
``Well, where is everything.''
``That is everything.''
``Change it back''
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor?
American Weblog in London
I was on the yahoo labs page, went to a certian project and got:
Error 404: File Not Found
The page '/error.html' could not be found. Please check that you did not mistype the URL. If you followed a link to this page, we apologize for the error.
Its a bad sign when you cannot find the error page
http://www.beyourowneviloverlord.tk
http://www.frozenchickenthrowing.tk
http://www.killercamel.tk
Y! should research how many of their features are currently used regularily by their users. IMHO, I do not think that cramming a web site with extra features does "advance the use of the Internet in daily lives and to continually improve the user experience".
It is good to see that Y! is interested in improving their services in many areas : "performance search, web search, vertical businesses and platform technologies", but they should concentrate on some specific business instead of trying to get a part of the market in as many different business markets as possible.
Call me oldfashioned, or offtopic, or whatnot, but I miss the days when you could talk to some store owner who has been specialized in one specific field and who could give you advice based on his experience. Don't get me wrong, I know that such people still exist, but they are getting rarer if you compare to all the Wal-Martish stores that are "diversifying" their line of products and services. The same is seen online...
DrkBr
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.
Most, if not all of these guys seem to be from Overture. I read the resumes which are available, simply because I was interested in what their focus for research would be. Everyone who has a blurb seems to have joined from Yahoo's acquisition of Overture..
Makes me wonder, then. Was Overture such a force in the search arena ?
Interestingly, I also notice that some of their developers are just BSc guys.. W00t!:) Its not a PhD/MSc only thing like Google (ok, there are a few PhDs as "senior" scientists)
Google: Lightweight pages, which is good for 56K users such as myself that are always downloading something off eDonkey. Very powerful search results, outputted in a simple and easy to read manner. Non-intrusive advertising. Small, simple, powerful.
Yahoo: Medium weight pages, due mostly to ads and other crap on their service that they're advertising. I remember they had popups, don't know if they do now. (Thank you, Firebird devs!) Search results that mimic but aren't as polished as Google. Has everything one could think of, excels at nothing.
Yahoo can't hold a candle to Google. Yahoo is a web portal. Google is a tool for searching. When I want to search, which do I use?
That said, the only way I think Google can become more useful is if they added a dictionary and thesaurus to their search box. I.E. "dictionary:crusade". Oh, and improve the Zietgeist. Other than that, Google shall remain the God of searching unless they muck it up.
All I see Yahoo doing is using this to add more crap to a site with already too much crap on it, truth be told. Simplicity is highly underrated.
Invention, disruption, innovation, improvement
What's interesting is the way they've arranged the words, Invention:disruption, innovation:improvement.
Have more than one woman involved in the research lab for the company.
Not to get into a whole discussion about gender here, but I'm guessing that having a larger percentage of women in the group might lead to research in different areas.
I mean, women are probably a decent chunk of search engine users these days; it might be interesting to see if they have different interests or ideas on how they want to search.
If their goal is to increase market share, then one step might be to make services that cater to a now generally marginalized but growing sector of net users -- women.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Really? I've noticed that when I do a search for just about anything, the top 10 to 15 are Spam. This, of course is not completly Google's fault, Spamers have learned how to manipulate Google with fake front door pages. But I've been finding Google less and less Spam free to the point now only marganably better than any other search.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.