On Yahoo!'s Acquisitions

Barry Norton writes "The Guardian has quite an insightful article about recent Yahoo acquisitions Delicious and Flickr. They quote Joshua Schachter, Delicious' creator: 'We're excited to be working with the Yahoo search team - they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. We're also excited to be joining our fraternal twin, Flickr!' And why Yahoo's interest? The article opines: 'It takes a lot of the hard work out of searching the web. The very clever thing about social software is that it puts the burden on to the user, not the provider.'"

Comments

wrong idea about Social Networks and search

[ChrisGilliard]

It takes a lot of the hard work out of searching the web. The very clever thing about social software is that it puts the burden on to the user, not the provider.

If this is how Yahoo sees it, they're missing the point. Yahoo (and other web-portals) can use Social Networks to learn more about their users. For instance, a certain social circle may all be members of a bowling league, so maybe show bowling ball advertisers to people that have a direct connection with the bowling league circle. The connection I see is more in delivering more appropriate content to users, not saving money on search.

Re:wrong idea about Social Networks and search

[BandwidthHog]

I don’t see that as a way to save money on search, but more as a way to offer a different kind of search or, in trendy parlance, to make searches more relevant. Basically what you’re doing with the whole user tagging thing is getting a bunch of human brains to categorize things for you, and the structure of the system causes those brains to only work on parts of the system that they personally give a damn about. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the infrastructure needed to sustain that is actually more expensive in the long term than large clusters of servers calculating PageRank or some other algorithm.

PR...!

[mister_llah]

What you see there is the Public Relations Friendly(tm) version of the advertising plan you speak of...

When making a statement about such an acquisition, you don't say "The very clever thing about social software is that we can sell advertising at higher rates because we can tailor the ads to the market and promise more responsive viewing."

It's not that they are missing the point, it's that it doesn't sound very good to come out and say something that sounds so self-centered.

YAHOO is trying to catch up...

[PenguinBoyDave]

With all of the services Google has been offering, YAHOO has to catch up if they hope to stay on top. Google started simple and grew. YAHOO exploded, and has never really grown. Personally, I like what YAHOO has to offer, but I spend much more time on Google.

That's just part of it..

[Lysol]

Sure, social networks can mine users data and habits, that's a big deal. But I'm sure Yahoo gets that. But don't underestimate having an army of users doing your work for you. I've worked for companies that would have killed to have users doing their work for them in this way. In fact, it's almost a sure thing to say that future 'content providers' will employ more of this along with AI and not have many companies employees - if any - touching any of the input data. As a programmer, sounds good to me..

Re:That's just part of it..

[cei]

Not like this is particularly new for Yahoo... when they first started out as just a web directory, most of the source of their portal was from user submissions, not crawling & indexing. In many ways, del.icio.us is a throwback to the early days for Yahoo, replacing hierarchal categories with tags.

Re:They bought it...

[Phanatic1a]

I'm far less concerned about their changing the name then about them completely ruining what made the original company worth purchasing in the first place.

Launch.com was great, until Yahoo took it over and made it completely fucking useless and annoying.

This!

[OSS_ilation]

Is! exciting! news!

Yahoo and Google

[mister_llah]

Why is it that when Google makes a purchase, it is lauded as a brilliant idea... ... and when Yahoo makes a purchase, it is bashed and made to be a horrible thing?

===

Can someone explain this to me, and in a way that doesn't involve singular instances... a broad spectrum view of why so many people are so keen on Google and so unkeen on Yahoo...

I'd really like to know!

Re:Yahoo and Google

[Scooter's_dad]

Can someone explain this to me, and in a way that doesn't involve singular instances... a broad spectrum view of why so many people are so keen on Google and so unkeen on Yahoo...

When I go to www.google.com I see a clean, empty page with a few lines of text and an input box. When I just visited www.yahoo.com, I saw Donald Trump's face. 'Nuff said.

Yahoo Meme Pulls Ahead of Google

[broward]

Interesting graph comparison of the major search engines.

It shows Yahoo pulling ahead of Google in 2005, and the
search engine battle itself is peaking in hype and media interest.

Yahoo's emergence into first place could be a function of their social software acquisitions.

http://www.realmeme.com:8080/roller/page/realmeme? entry=google_versus_yahoo

Re:Yahoogle

[tjr]

Indeed, Google didn't invent any of those things, but they sure made them better. Substantially better, in some cases. Google is known for having a lot of scientists on staff, and they likely do a lot of original CS research to make things better, but they also must have a lot of really good HCI people who know how to design interfaces, and a lot of really good engineers who know how to actually build usable software.