Yahoo! Search Turns 5, Has Tech to Show For It
It was 5 years ago today that Yahoo! stopped using Google to power its searches and started using its own search technology, the company wrote today in a blog post. Everyone knows that things aren't looking good for Yahoo! in business terms, and the company's search and advertising market shares look even worse. But you know what deserves some celebration on this 5th birthday? The search team's work on some really cool search related technologies.
Yahoo! Search Monkey, BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) and Delicious are three big wins for the Yahoo! search team - even if no one has yet figured out how to turn them into money. That's not the only reason why we're all here on the web is it? Isn't it largely for love of innovation? Yahoo! in general, including the search team, deserve applause for their embrace of innovation.
In the search team's blog post about its birthday today, the three technologies listed above were highlighted, along with some other tools like the mobile OneSearch or SearchAssist - things we don't really care about to be honest.
SearchMonkey
SearchMonkey is really exciting, though. It's a way for site owners to add structured, dynamic data to their search results listings. It's a semantic web play and if it succeeds it should make search results all over the web much more useful. Think movie ratings displayed automatically next to a Netflix page when you search for a movie title, for starters.
We've written about SearchMonkey a number of times, most importantly in this post about its genesis and this post about its role in the future of the company.
BOSS
Yahoo! BOSS is another technology we find quite interesting. It's a way to use the Yahoo! index of web pages and the varoom to make searches go, but to perform those searches and show results on your own web page. People use it to make topical search engines on a wide variety of sites, but there's no better example of a great implementation than what TechCrunch has done with BOSS in their site search. A week ago today Yahoo announced that SearchMonkey markup will now be included in BOSS - enabling, in effect, custom semantic search engines powered by Yahoo! but on any website. That's powerful stuff.
Delicious
Those two innovations are big and ambitious but they are also quite new and unproven. The most solidly exciting project that Yahoo! Search has touched in the past 5 years? In our mind it's social bookmarking service Delicious. Acquired at the end of 2005, Delicious is one of the most powerful apps on the web today. Really! We use it all day long, mostly for search. Several of the ways we use it are things we wouldn't tell you about even if you pulled out our toenails, they are so useful. We will say, though, that Delicious is still the best way to track faint signals of interest by large groups of people on the web.
Founder Joshua Schachter, who joined Google last month, says Delicious would have been even more incredible had the clumsy ogres at Yahoo! not crushed it like a delicate kitten they wanted to but were unable to love properly.
If you're not familiar with Delicious (but you're still reading this far into this article?) you should check out CommonCraft's video Social Bookmarking in Plain English.
So on the Search team's 5th birthday we've got two huge technologies that were just born and one old, underdeveloped app that the founder says was suffocated by Yahoo. That's what we've got to celebrate. But in this world of advertising obsessed boredom, walled gardens and half-baked services on the part of most major consumer tech vendors - these three technologies are really something to be thankful for! That's not even mentioning Yahoo's other properties that do so much to enrich our lives, like Flickr, Pipes and Upcoming.
Yes, Yahoo! - you may get teased all the time about your trouble turning mind blowing traffic into search share and money, but on this birthday of your own search technology - we think you deserve a lot of credit for recognizing and working on some really exciting search related tools and services.
People should stop giving you such a hard time about your problems, too. We'd love to see those critics pull off what you've already done, much less beat Google.
Disclaimer: The author is a member of the Yahoo! Product Advisory Council - which means I get to visit Yahoo! a few times a year, see new products under embargo and share good times and bad with some Yahoos over dinner. At least for as long as they put up with semi-snarky blog posts like this and keep inviting me back.
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Happy Birthday Yahoo! Search. In its 5 years Yahoo! hasn't been able to eat into Google's dominance of the search market. Will future be any different? I doubt that..
Reminds me of AVIS vs Hertz commercials. We are second-largest, so we try harder.
No one stays #1 forever. Yahoo has several very good prods in its portfolio (+1 on Delicious, Flickr, web mail) and I hope they find their fighting spirit again.
great write up, thanks for sharing.
It is really interesting to see how we migrate to one search tool or the other. There is no question that an overwhelming majority of internet users do their searching on Google (including myself). However, post like this one remind me of all the superior search technology that Yahoo has developed (don't forget about the enhanced search plug-ins that they started doing last year).
Why do i still use Google? I honestly don't know, I should be using Yahoo.
Yahoo looks to be doing OK from I can see. :)
Search is picking up...
Yahoo increases US search engine share for fifth month in row:
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/02/18/234897/yahoo-increases-us-search-engine-share-for-fifth-month-in.htm
And Yahoo's Apt display platform seems to be working pretty nicely too...
AH Belo Sees $1.2 Million From Yahoo's Behavioral Targeting:
http://biz.yahoo.com/paidcontent/090217/1_333734_id.html?.v=2
As Go Ogle search results become more ad-laden, searchers will tire of wading through results to find relevant entries and be lured to alternatives such as Ask and, yes, Yahoo!
Delicious has preempted Go Ogle in bookmarks, in its ability to search on multiple keywords; and by its ability to include "public" bookmarks - or not.
(And Yahoo! might be said to have the edge over Go Ogle in TOS clarity...off topic.)
Go Ogle's search tech depends more and more upon built-in intrusive "intelligence" (what has the user searched, before?). Yahoo! seems to gear more toward tools (a la Popular Mechanics).
Yahoo's technology is comparable with Google's, but for some reason I will always use Google. I believe this to be the case because of the homepage. Compare the Yahoo and Google homepage, Google has no ads while Yahoo is littered with them. What's my point? Google could be making millions a month from putting ads on their homepage, but they don't because they've "invested" in the customer.
http://tr.im/gk8j
Go Yahoo!
Great infomation, thank you:)
Congrats to Yahoo on 5! I must say it is growing from a smart toddler to an amazing Kindergartener with full of tricks.
Delicious, I think is the most unassumed, underutilized weapon in search which Yahoo has. With the chatter growing around real-time search (a la twitter) -- why doesn't Yahoo mine the delicious data? Talk is cheap on twitter but the sites I'm bookmarking have more meaningful data. Why don't they try to analyze the delicious data with say a hilltop algo? (My hands are itching to do that once)
Anyway, enjoy the cake and keep throwing the 'banana' to the developers!
Indus
thank you for sharing this post with us.
really good; not bad!
thanks for sharing with us; great post!
thanks for sharing with us great post
Yahoo's technology is comparable with Google's, but for some reason I will always use Google. I believe this to be the case because of the homepage.
thank you for sharing this post with us
Süper TECHNOLOGY :D
A very brief and well put together article for those not so savvy with web dev. Good read. Even for an experienced web dev'r like myself.