October 8, 2009

Yahoo! Snags Sales Exec from Microsoft

Per Boomtown, Seth Dallaire has joined Yahoo! as vice president of mid-market sales, a new position. Dallaire will be responsible for mid-market search and display ad sales. Dallaire was previously a top ad exec at Microsoft.

This past year, the trend has been Yahoo!s jumping ship for Microsoft. Qi Lu, Sean Suchter, and Scott Moore are among the many former Purple People now working hard for the money at the Redmond-based software giant.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 24, 2009

More Former Yahoo!'s Head to Microsoft; Weiner Upgrades to LinkedIn CEO

The reasons for Microsoft to still consider a deal with Yahoo! diminished even further this week as news broke that three former Yahoo!'s have been recruited to Microsoft. They aren't the first. You would think there was a fire sale on former Purple People.

Larry Heck, Scott Moore, Qi Lu, and Sean Suchter have all ended up at Microsoft after leaving behind their Yahoo! gigs.

Now, joining them, is Kevin Timmons; Yongdong Wang, former Yahoo VP of international search; and Knut Risvik, who incidentally spent time at Google after his stint at Yahoo!

Microsoft isn't the only place former Yahoo!'s are making their mark. Jeff Weiner joined LinkedIn last year as President, having left Yahoo! last summer and then hanging out at a couple of venture capital firms. Now, he's changing his title to CEO.

What do you think about the departed? Does Microsoft have any incentive to negotiate a deal with Yahoo? Leave a comment and let us know!

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 3:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 11, 2009

Will New CFO Morse Answer Yahoo's SOS

Yahoo announced the appointment of a new CFO today - Tim Morse "will be responsible for the company's finance, investor relations, and mergers and acquisitions groups. He will commence employment on June 17, 2009 and will assume the responsibilities of CFO on July 1, 2009," the company stated.

The new SOS - is "Save Our Stock" and I am sure there are a lot of people hoping Morse is related to the inventor of Morse code and gets the message.

"Tim has a proven ability to translate strategy into structure, process, and execution, and I am delighted that he will be joining my leadership team to help drive Yahoo!'s growth," said Carol Bartz, Yahoo CEO. "With his passion for operational finance, global experience, and expertise simplifying complex organizations and managing growth, Tim is a natural fit for Yahoo!."

Morse comes from Altera Corporation, a semiconductor company and before that GE where he worked for over 15 years.

Many stockholders will be following his performance.

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 5, 2009

Former Google Recruiter Confesses Hiring Restrictions, While Yahoo! Aggressively Recruits

Yesterday, we reported on a new antitrust investigation targeting Silicon Valley tech companies regarding possible agreements to not hire away each other's talent. Now, the San Jose Mercury News is reporting that a former Google recruiter is fessing up to having a 'Do Not Touch' list of companies they were not to go after for talent. Two companies on the list? Genentech and Yahoo!

Yahoo!, on the other hand, has no such list according to a former recruiter for the company. Instead, recruiters were rewarded for wooing talent from competitors.

Simply having a list would not be automatically indicative of anticompetitive hiring practices. It could simply be an initiative by a company to prevent upsetting business partners. A 'Do Not Touch' list would be in violation of antitrust law if it were agreed to by companies. It's the collaboration where the offense occurs.

Officially, the companies being investigated and the Department of Justice remain largely mum on the issue, at most confirming that an investigation is, in fact, happening.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

June 4, 2009

Eric Brown Tapped as Yahoo! SVP of Global Communications

Eric Brown has been appointed by Yahoo! to the role of senior vice president of global communications. Brown is charged with public relations, executive communications, product promotion, public affairs, internal communications, corporate reputation management, as well as social media outreach. He reports to Yahoo! chief marketing officer, Elisa Steele, who joined Yahoo! in late March.

"Our communications strategies and programs for Yahoo!'s key audiences are core to the company's success, and we are very excited that Eric will be joining Yahoo! in this critical role," said Steele. "Eric's extensive track record as a communications leader will be invaluable to our efforts to globally reinvigorate Yahoo!'s brand."

Brown comes to Yahoo! from NetApp, where he was vice president of corporate relations. There, he headed up global communications efforts that spanned 30 countries. NetApp is a data storage solutions company.

Prior to NetApp, Brown headed up public relations efforts for Adaptec, another data storage company.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 1, 2009

Ex-Googler Yoelle Maarek Becomes a Purple Person

In 2006, Yoelle Maarek founded the Google Haifa Engineering Center. While there, her team contributed such features as Google Suggest, Searching Ads, and Interactive Annotations on YouTube.

Maarek left Google and will now lead the Yahoo! Lab in Haifa with Ronny Lempel. The lab was opened in March 2008.

Prior to her Google gig, Maarek worked for IBM Research both in New York and Haifa. Maarek received her undergrad and grad degrees in Paris and later her PhD from Technion in Haifa. During her PhD studies, she also was a visiting student at Columbia University in New York.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 28, 2009

Dossett Departs Yahoo! After Just Six Months

Jeff Dossett joined Yahoo! last fall but recently gave his resignation. The reason for the departure is personal, according to BoomTown.

Dossett's responsibilities have been assumed by Vertical Audience Experiences head Jimmy Pitaro and Search & Social Applications Tim Mayer.

Dossett originally replaced Scott Moore and Al Warms. Previously, Dossett worked at Microsoft.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 29, 2009

Yahoo Fires Them On The Road, Hundreds Get Axe Today

Looks like no one can hide from the Yahoo axe today. Last week it was going to be 700, today the number is 600 - but people are being aggressively laid off - apparently even employees on the road are getting notification of termination, according to Silicon Alley Insider.

Morale must be low over at Yahoo right now, especially after CEO Carol Bartz stated, ""You have three people telling project engineers what to do, and nobody's fucking doing anything," during an analyst earnings call last week, CNN Money reported.

Stock prices have risen about 4% today - similar to the reaction to the layoff announcement last week. Sad if layoff notifications are the only time the stock gets spikes.

Posted by Frank Watson at 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

April 27, 2009

Former Adobe Exec Heads to Yahoo!

Former Adobe exec Bryan Lamkin has been tapped by Yahoo! to become SVP of Applications Products, according to Kara Swisher. Lamkin replaces Scott Dietzen, who came to Yahoo! via the Zimbra acquisition in 2007. Dietzen is being promoted to VP.

Lamkin spent 14 years at Adobe leading product strategy, marketing and product development for products such as Photoshop, Flash and Illustrator. He then became executive-in-residence at two venture capitalist firms: New Enterprise Associates and Sutter Hill Ventures.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 31, 2009

Long Term Tech Exec to Exit Yahoo!

Another executive at Yahoo! is planning to leave the Sunnyvale search engine. Venkat Panchapakesan, executive vice president of the Audience Technology Group will say farewell at the end of the summer. It will be almost one year after consumer-facing platforms were moved under his direction after a Yahoo! reorganization last summer.

Panchapakesan was CEO of Yahoo! India R&D from 2003-2006. He's returning to India after an 11 year stint as a Purple Person.

While at Yahoo!, Panchapakesan worked on a bunch of products including Mail, Flickr, Answers, Groups, Messenger and content properties. Prior to Yahoo!, Panchapakesan worked for Hewlitt Packard.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 25, 2009

Top Yahoo! Mobile Exec Departs for Personal Reasons

Marco Boerries, Executive Vice President of the Connected Device Division at Yahoo! has announced his resignation. Boerries cited personal reasons. Apparently, he has some family issues that has his time being split between the Bay Area and Germany.

Boerries spent four years as Yahoo!'s top mobile exec.

Here are just a few of the stories that happened on his watch: Yahoo! to Launch New, Comprehensive Mobile Portal Yahoo! Adds Features to oneSearch Shortcut, Including Voice Search and Auto-Locate Yahoo! oneSearch Selected as Mobile Search Service for T-mobile's Web2go Yahoo Unveils Upgrades to Mobile Search Platform Yahoo Uses Windows Mobile To Escalate Yahoo Go Reach Yahoo Signs Mobile Search Deals with Six Asian Carriers

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 23, 2009

Yahoo! News Executive Editor Heads to Hearst

Yahoo!'s executive editor and general manager of news is heading to Hearst. Neeraj Khemlani will become Heart's VP of Digital Media.

Khemlani is one of many Yahoo! execs to leave in the past year. Though, most of his former colleagues have ended up at Microsoft.

Most recently, Larry Heck, vice president of search and advertising sciences departed for Microsoft. Prior to that, Sean Suchter, Qi Lu, and Scott Moore gave up their purple people status for digs at the Redmond-based software giant.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 12, 2009

Yet Another Yahoo! Heads to Microsoft

Larry Heck, the vice president of Search & Advertising Sciences at Yahoo Labs, has been wooed by Microsoft. And when he gets there, he'll be surrounded by a few familiar faces. Heck is just the latest in a stream of Yahoos leaving the purple behind for employment with the Redmond-based software giant.

Sean Suchter, Qi Lu and most recently, Scott Moore have all departed Yahoo! for Microsoft.

Steve Ballmer may not be interested in acquiring Yahoo as a company any longer, but it appears that Plan B has been to acquire search-related employees instead. That leaves Carol Bartz will less leverage if she indeed wants to strike some kind of deal - even a partnership or a search-only sell-off - with Microsoft.

Then again, since it was widely speculated that Yahoo's woes were management-related, maybe Bartz knows best that saying goodbye to a few execs is a good thing for Yahoo afterall.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 3, 2009

Jill Nash to Depart Yahoo; Scott Moore Heads to Microsoft

Chief communications officer Jill Nash is leaving Yahoo. I can't say that I blame her. Dealing with the press during turbulent and ultimately failed Microsoft acquisition attempt plus dropping stocks plus Jerry Yang's stepping down as CEO must have been exhausting.

Also, former Yahoo Scott Moore is headed back to Microsoft to run content efforts for the U.S. Moore left Yahoo last November. If you'd like to read about his back-and-forth career in Silicon Valley, read Swisher's tabloid-esque piece here.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 16, 2009

Stock Price Low Yet New Yahoo CEO Could Make $19 Million Plus?

Apparently the new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz could make well over $19 million dollars this year, according to Reuters. This despite the fact that some of her comments the other day caused a further dip in their stock price, the New York Times reported.

Bartz receives a $1 million dollar base salary, and has bonuses of up to 200% of that. But she will also receive $10 million in cash and restricted stock to cover benefits and stock options she gave up at Autodesk.

The New York Times stated: "After reports that Ms. Bartz wasn't sold on the idea of selling Yahoo's search business to Microsoft, investors sent Yahoo shares plunging 6.5 percent on Thursday."

Seems the Microsoft deal just will not die. Regardless, Bartz joins Yahoo when their stock has fallen from a 52 week high of $30.05 to a under $10 - the stock is now trading at around $11.50.

Disclosure and commentary on her financial package could further impact Yahoo's short term value.

Posted by Frank Watson at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 13, 2009

Did Yahoo President Sue Decker See New CEO As Snub?

Despite the suggestion by ValleyWag, that incoming Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz's first job would be to fire President Sue Decker, seems Decker beat her to the punch by announcing her resignation.

Decker has overseen many of the few innovations and major changes at Yahoo during the past few years - as Terry Semel stood down to give Jerry Yang the CEO spot and their stock fell from the 30s to below 10. But, ValleyWag reports Decker was ambitious and "engineered a reorganization that drove out her chief rival, COO Dan Rosensweig, and then led a palace coup to drive out Hollywood movie mogul Terry Semel as CEO."

People had thought Decker was a major contender for the CEO spot and when another female from outside the company was named Decker had to leave.

Meanwhile, Chairman of the Board Roy Bostock stated "“The Board thanks Sue for her service as President, the important contributions she has made to Yahoo!'s development in a variety of roles over the past 8-1/2 years, and her willingness to work with Carol Bartz to ensure a smooth transition. We respect her decision to move on to other challenges and wish her only the best.”

The news of the new CEO and Decker leaving did little to impact the Yahoo stock price today.

Posted by Frank Watson at 5:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Report: Carol Bartz Accepted Yahoo Offer to Become CEO

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Carol Bartz has accepted Yahoo's offer to become their next CEO. I have no link at the moment. Just a breaking news headline:

Bartz is currently executive chairman of Autodesk, a design software company. She formerly was CEO of Autodesk and was an executive as Sun Microsystems. She currently serves on the boards of Cisco (with Jerry Yang) and Intel (with Sue Decker).

Yahoo! stock was on the rise in reaction to the news. At the time of this post, Yahoo was at $12.38.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 9, 2009

Is Yahoo on the Verge of Naming Yang's Replacement?

The Wall Street Journal today is reporting that a new Yahoo! CEO could be named as early as next week. Lately, the buzz has surrounded Autodesk executive chairman Carol Bartz.

Bartz previously was CEO of Autodesk from 1992 to 2006. She has also been an executive at Sun Microsystems.

She serves on the board of Cisco with current Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang and on the Intel board with current Yahoo! President Susan Decker.

Last November, Jerry Yang announced that he would be stepping down from his role as CEO. He will remain at the Sunnyvale search engine as Chief Yahoo!

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 16, 2008

The Purple People Collective: Freelance and Job Listings for Laid-Off Yahoos

Yahoo! has gone through layoffs twice this year and at least one formerly purple person has turned his lemons into lemonade (though his tweets suggest he's a big fan of lattes).

Ryan Kuder has launched a site called the Purple People Collective (ironic that the initials are PPC). It has listings for work for laid off Yahoos.

Others who have been laid off are welcome, as well. Most of the listings as of this post appear to be for tech-related jobs.

On a personal note of encouragement, I've been laid off a few times and every time the next job was way better than the last. My husband was laid off at the beginning of this year and his "new job" is so much better.

Hopefully, the same happens for ex-Yahoo's and others facing the same fate. Don't forget to check out the Search Engine Watch Job Board for opportunities as well!

via BoomTown

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 4, 2008

Moore and Warms Out, Dossett In at Yahoo

Scott Moore and Al Warms are leaving Yahoo, while Jeff Dossett is joining the Sunnyvale search engine. Dossett replaces Moore, who headed up Yahoo!'s media group. Al Warms headed up Yahoo News, Tech and Education, and came to Yahoo through the acquisition of Buzztracker.

"Jeff is one of the country's most experienced online media executives, and I'm confident he is well-suited to lead Yahoo!'s audience business to even greater heights," said Hilary Schneider, Yahoo! executive vice president. "His understanding of consumer needs and high-quality premium programming will help ensure that we continue with Yahoo!'s reputation of inspiring audiences and attracting marketer dollars."

Moore and Warms join the mass exodus of senior level employees leaving Yahoo in the aftermath of a failed acquisition by Microsoft and in the midst of poor earnings, layoffs and a plummeting stock price.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 9, 2008

Yahoo Nabs Former MSN Exec Bradford

Yahoo has initiated another executive shakeup, but this time they've brought in a big gun to help their ad sales and business development. Joanne Bradford, who led Microsoft's MSN for 7 years until March, when she left Microsoft to join Spot Runner, the Web-based TV ad startup.

Bradford has joined Yahoo in the newly created role of senior vice president, U.S. Revenue and Market Development. She will oversee sales, market development for advertisers, small business, and Yahoo HotJobs, and will report to executive VP Hilary Schneider.

"My decision to come to Yahoo was simple, because there is no other company that combines one of the world's most recognizable brands with unparalleled reach, industry-leading products and programming, and a full spectrum of advertising offerings for marketers," Bradford said in a statement. "I am convinced that the very best days for this company are ahead, and I want to leverage my experience in programming, distribution, and selling to help Yahoo! take this business to the next level."

Bradford's new role in effect replaces that of David Karnstedt, Yahoo's senior VP of U.S. Sales. Karnstedt announced his plans to resign earlier this summer, and will now leave Yahoo on September 16 for a new opportunity as an executive-in-residence at a Valley-based venture capital firm. Karnstedt was largely pushed aside in the February reorg that also led to the departure of Wenda Harris Millard.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 24, 2008

Former Yahoo, Tacoda Exec Heads to interCLICK

Jason Lynn, Director of Solutions Engineering for Yahoo/Right Media is exiting the Sunnyvale search engine to become Executive Vice President of Product Management at online advertising network interCLICK. Prior to his Yahoo/Right Media stint, Lynn was Director of Product Management at behavioral targeting firm TACODA, which was acquired by AOL in July 2007.

That's the same month Yahoo finalized its acquisition of Right Media.

Lynn joins an exodus of Yahoo execs as of late. Network Division Executive Vice President Jeff Weiner left and became Executive in Residence at two venture capital firms. Vish Makhijani, Senior Vice President of Search, is now heading up the Bay Area operations of Yandex, a Russian language search engine. Brad Garlinghouse, Sr. VP and author of the Peanut Butter Manifesto, and Qi Lu, Executive Vice President of Search and Advertising Technology have left as well.

Founders of other Yahoo-acquired companies aren't sticking around either. Flickr co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake and del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter have said their goodbyes.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 26, 2008

Yahoo Plans Reorg: More Centralization

Confirming recent rumors of another coming reorganization, Yahoo today announced its plans to centralize many of its product and engineering teams into one regional group in the U.S., rather than maintaining separate divisions for each set of products.

Yahoo is creating three new teams that will report to President Sue Decker:

An Audience Products Division will assume responsibility for companywide product strategy and product management. It will be led by Ash Patel who previously managed the company's Platforms & Infrastructure group.
A U.S. region with accountability for all go-to-market activity in the U.S. will be led by Hilary Schneider, who previously headed the company's Global Partner Solutions group.
An Insights Strategy team will assume responsibility for centralizing and executing a common strategy for the use of data and analysis across Yahoo. The company plans to name this group's leader within the next few weeks.

According to Decker, these moves have been in the works for several months, and complement last year's changes to centralize more of Yahoo's business.

"The changes we're making today will help deliver superior global products for users and enable faster and better decision-making," Decker said in a statement. "This is a logical next step in light of our success last year in moving to a more centralized approach to developing world-class marketing products. We have planned these changes deliberately over the past several months to clarify responsibilities and to capitalize on the scale advantages while allowing for fine tuning to meet local market needs."

Yahoo has restructured its search group, which recently lost SVP and General Manager of Search Vishal Makhijani to Russian search engine Yandex. Prabhakar Raghavan has been tapped to direct search strategy, and Tuoc Luong is the interim leader of the search product team. Both Prabhakar and Tuoc will also continue in their roles as the leaders of Yahoo! Research and Search Engineering respectively. In addition, David Ku will lead the Advertising Technology Group within Search.

Yahoo is also making changes to its technology organization, devoting resources to developing a cloud computing and storage infrastructure; moving more of Yahoo onto common platforms; and creating a stronger partnership between product and engineering teams.

The new Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group will be charged with developing a computing infrastructure that balances scalability with cost effectiveness. It will also move all consumer-facing platform teams to the Audience Technology Group, led by Venkat Panchapakesan.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 20, 2008

Yahoo Re-Organizes, Execs Drop Like Flies

Carl Icahn may not have to worry about the Yahoo! severance plan as much as he originally thought. Yahoo is reorganizing and execs are bailing left and right, and they're not even waiting for a proxy board takeover to make their moves.

Earlier this week came the news that Jeff Weiner was leaving the search company. Now, Qi Lu, Yahoo's Executive Vice President of Search and Advertising Technology is headed out the door. So is Vish Makhijani, Senior Vice President of Search, is also exiting.

Brad Garlinghouse, author of the (in)famous Peanut Butter Manifesto, is "considering alternatives" but is widely expected to bolt as well.

Lu, Makhijani, and Garlinghouse were all moved to the newly created Global Products group, to be headed by Ash Patel, the current Exec. Vice President of Yahoo's Platforms and Infrastructure, according to Kara Swisher. Patel has been with Yahoo since 1996 and is not seen as the type of leader needed to jumpstart the company.

However, the LA Times reported that Lu was already planning to move to China while Makhijani is heading over to Russia's leading search engine, Yandex, to lead SF-area operations.

Another move expected in the reorganization is the expanded responsibilities of Hillary Schneider, Executive Vice President of Global Partner Solutions. Schneider and Patel will be peers and report directly to Yahoo President Sue Decker, who is said to be largely responsible for the re-organization.

Still, the founders of at least 2 acquired companies aren't sticking around for the new arrangement. Flickr co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake and del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter are saying, "Adios!" to Yahoo.

At least, that "Now Hiring" notice from a few weeks ago is finally starting to make sense.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

June 17, 2008

It's Official: Weiner to Leave Yahoo

Last week, rumors were rampant that Yahoo's Network Division Executive Vice President, Jeff Weiner, would be leaving the Sunnyvale search engine. The news is now official, with an announcement of Weiner's new role as an Executive in Residence at Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, two venture capitalist firms.

Weiner will split his time evenly between the two firms, advising leadership on their existing tech portfolios as well as consulting on new investment opportunities.

“Jeff's operational experience in scaling products, teams and revenue will help Greylock enhance our capabilities and add value to our investments,” said David Sze, General Partner at Greylock.

“We are thrilled to have access to Jeff's perspective on web product strategy and operations,” said Theresia Ranzetta, General Partner at Accel. “Additionally, we look forward to leveraging Jeff's expertise regarding the convergence of media and technology for existing and future Accel portfolio properties.”

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 11, 2008

Yahoo Exec Set to Bail?

Yahoo's Jeff Weiner, Network Division Executive Vice President, is rumored to be leaving the company after a month's long paternity leave, according to Kara Swisher. Weiner is reportedly tired of all the drama caused by the failed Microsoft acquisition and Carl Icahn's proxy board. Weiner may become an executive in residence at a Silicon Valley venture capitalist firm (he wouldn't be the first to do so).

Four Senior Vice Presidents are rumored to be the most likely candidates to fill Weiner's shoes.

Front Door and Network Services' Tapan Bhat
Brad Garlinghouse, who heads Yahoo's communications and communities arenas
Media Group head Scott Moore
Yahoo Search's Vish Makhijani

A fifth option is not to replace Weiner at all and to re-organize the company structure once more.

What would you do? Leave now or wait in case the severance plan is enacted. Tell us in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yahoo! Says Severance Plan Unlikely to Cost $2.4 Billion

In a series of letters, Carl Icahn has been giving Yahoo's Board of Directors a hard time about a severance plan that would be enacted if a "Change of Control" occurred at the company. He claims the plan would would cost $2.4 billion, making an acquisition or change of board of directors very costly.

But Yahoo has filed an FAQ with the SEC defending the severance plan and attempting to explain why the $2.4 billion number is unreliable.

The severance plan would only take place if a Change of Control occurs.
Voting in Carl Icahn's board at the shareholders meeting would trigger the plan, and the closing of an acquisition deal with Microsoft would trigger the plan.
Yahoo cannot retract the plan until 30 days after the abandonment of a potential Change of Control, including an announcement of Change of Control. Essentially, Icahn himself made a termination of the severance impossible by announcing the proxy board so soon after Microsoft abandoned its bid.
Yahoo's compensation consultant did not call the severance plan "nuts." He called the idea that 100% of Yahoo employees would use the plan "nuts."
Icahn got the $2.4 billion number from a shareholder lawsuit filed in the state of Michigan. Using the same assumptions as the lawsuit, Yahoo says the number would be closer to $845 million if 30% left and $514 million if 15% left. This is all based on a $35 per share stock price. Icahn is urging Yahoo to sell for $34.375.
The plan would be enacted for employees who were fired without Cause or those who left for Good Reason. Cause is used by companies to fire employees who aren't doing their job. Good Reason could be used if an employees salary or bonus target was decreased substantially, if they were relocated further than 35 miles from their current office, or if there was a big change in an employee's duties and responsibilities.

And what about the "poison pill" characterization by Icahn? Here's what the FAQ had to say about that:

The term “poison pill” is widely understood to refer to stockholder rights plans which work by allowing existing stockholders (except the acquiror) to buy more shares at a substantial discount to the then current share price of the target if the acquiror purchases above a specified level of stock of the target (usually 15%) without the consent of the target's board. As a result, this substantially dilutes the acquiror's holdings and makes the acquisition much more expensive. The Plan, which is designed to preserve the value of Yahoo! during a period of uncertainty, has no such purpose or effect.

What do you think of Yahoo's FAQ? Are they really looking out for their employees or are they trying to prevent an acquisition or a proxy board takeover? Sound off in the comments!

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 30, 2008

Jerry Yang's Anything-But-Silent Life

While many are saying how Jerry Yang seems to be silent on last weekend's come-and-gone Microsoft ultimatum, his life is anything but silent. Kara Swisher reports that his wife had a baby!

But I'm not sure why people expect Yang to pull himself away from his new bundle of joy to simply repeat what he's said all along: Yahoo is undervalued by Microsoft's bid and the answer to the offer as it stands is No.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:31 AM | Permalink

April 3, 2008

Yahoo! also Loses Rock Star; Music VP Ian Rogers Moves to Start-up

Two months after acquiring FoxyTunes, and setting in place a bold new plan for Yahoo! Music, Vice President Ian Rogers has resigned from Yahoo! Music to join stealth start-up TopSpin Media, which aims to use software to help artists earn money from their music. Rogers had some serious plans in mind for Yahoo! Music and it's sad we won't see them come to fruition. Yahoo! has had some great success in the media market--pictures at Flickr, the new web-based Yahoo! Media Player--while continuing to fall behind Google in search share. Yahoo! needs to start looking for a replacement ASAP if they want to stay relevant.

Posted by at 3:47 AM | Permalink

February 13, 2008

Yahoo Layoffs Top 1,000 Employees in U.S.

Yahoo layoffs may top 1,000 employees before the U.S. mass layoff ends.

When 50 or more new claims for unemployment benefits are received from one company in a month, government statisticians designate it a mass layoff.

If the layoff lasts more than 31 days, it's called an extended mass layoff. This one? Massive.

Techmeme has excellent coverage of individuals who've made their job loss public or blogged about their experience. No stigma. No badge of shame.

Signs of the subprime times we live in.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 12:35 AM | Permalink

January 21, 2008

Yahoo Layoffs Downsized to Hundreds

Yahoo job cuts won't be as severe as rumored this weekend. Kevin Delaney of The Wall Street Journal reports sources close to Yahoo put the estimated number of layoffs in the hundreds. The New York Times chimes in with a similar figure and equally anonymous sources.

No one seems to know the exact extent of any future layoffs.

Paul Kedrosky of Infectious Greed knows one thing for sure: "When Yahoo does deliver the layoff numbers ... the company's stock will likely be sold, with the numbers not matching the whisper and therefore disappointing investors with its lack of aggression."

Miguel Helft in the NYT reports today on weekend blog reports of the layoffs: "During the weekend, some blogs reported that Yahoo was considering layoffs of 10 to 20 percent of its work force. But the people close to the company, who discussed Yahoo's layoff plans on condition that they not be identified, said the cuts would most likely be in the hundreds."

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 11:44 PM | Permalink

January 9, 2008

What's Next for Terry Semel?

When Terry Semel joined Yahoo as chairman and CEO in May 2001, he left behind the investment firm he started, Windsor Media. According to a report from paidContent.org, Semel is reviving that company, after losing his job as CEO in June 2007. Semel still sits on Yahoo's board of directors as non-executive chairman.

He's reportedly taking a couple of Yahoo execs with him: Drew Buckley, who headed Yahoo Originals, and Jeff Karish, head of media strategy. It remains to be seen how Windsor Media will take shape, either as an investment firm or media company.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:22 AM | Permalink

October 19, 2007

Yahoo CMO Resigns, Heading for Big Consumer Brand?

Yahoo chief marketing officer Cammie Dunaway will leave Yahoo on November 2 for a new opportunity, which may be a large consumer brand, according to ClickZ News. She reportedly told colleagues she will not share details about her new position until the middle of next week. Dunaway, who joined Yahoo in 2003, formerly managed interactive advertising for Frito-Lay.

Yahoo's VP of Global Brand Marketing Allen Olivo "will serve as the acting leader" and report to Yahoo President Sue Decker. Kara Swisher broke the news on the BoomTown blog this morning.

UPDATE: Dunaway announced that she is joining Nintendo as executive vice president for sales and marketing, effective on Nov. 5.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 5:12 PM | Permalink

October 1, 2007

Yahoo Calls In Steve Jobs to Inspire VPs

Instead of the rumored mass firing expected to take place at last week's all-day meeting of top Yahoo execs in Sunnyvale, attendees were treated to real goals and concrete plans from company leadership, and a guest appearance from Apple CEO Steve Jobs to provide an extra burst of inspiration, according to Kara Swisher.

What do you do when you want to inject a little inspiration into a company that needs a lot of it? Do you hold an all-day meeting of top execs where you actually outline specific goals and exhibit better leadership? Do you admit your corporate culture is a little weak and promise to focus on strengthening it? Do you trot out all the senior execs and let them talk about their concrete plans (and, better still, actually prepare them to deliver their spiel with some level of quality)? Do you do some post-lunch touchy-feely group exercises to get people talking?

Best of all, if you really want to send things over the top, do you bring out an icon so beloved as to give goosebumps to explain to the troops how he managed to turn his once-beleaguered and now-soaring company around?

All that and more occurred on Friday at Yahoo HQ as CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker really put on a show that seemed to resonate with the 300-plus top Yahoo executives (vice president and above) gathered there, capped by an appearance by Apple's Steve Jobs, who is apparently now Silicon Valley's equivalent of Oprah.

The company is 76 days into the return of Yang as CEO, following the departure of Terry Semel from that role in June. While Yang had promised a "100-day review," he has since backed off from a concrete timetable. Regardless of the timetable, it's clear that changes are already afoot, and more are planned at Yahoo, the perennial second-place search engine.

According to Swisher, much of the focus of Yang's plans revolve around an "ecosystem" that centers on the interplay of advertisers, publishers, and consumers. Plans include building out Yahoo's ad network, using its "consumer insights" to improve ad targeting, creating a corporate culture open to new ideas, and a more open developer network, Swisher said.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:07 PM | Permalink

August 30, 2007

More Exec Moves at Yahoo

Yahoo, which has undergone a few rounds of reorganization this year, is in the midst of more changes in its ad sales business. This time, Hilary Schneider will be tapped to head a group overseeing ad sales and publisher relationships, effectively replacing Greg Coleman as head of global sales, according to Kara Swisher at All Things Digital.

In an internal memo (posted by paidContent), Yahoo president Sue Decker describes the changes, describing a new Global Partner Solutions (GPS) division under Schneider that will have responsibility for all of Yahoo's “partners” – advertisers, agencies, resellers, publishers, ad networks, developers, or others.

Jeff Weiner, EVP of Yahoo's Network Division, will add to his responsibilities, currently including most consumer-facing assets, including search and social media sites. Weiner will regain control of many of the businesses previously under Schneider in the Local Markets and Commerce (LMC) division, including shopping, travel, autos, real estate and local. Weiner ran these businesses from 2002 to 2006 as SVP of search and marketplaces, before a previous reorg moved them under Schneider.

This reorg is not yet as big as the moves in June to oust Terry Semel, when Jerry Yang returned as CEO and Sue Decker was named president; or February's creation of three new operating groups (although much of that was undone by Semel and Decker). But since it's just about halfway through a 100-day plan by Yang to scrutinize the business, we can expect more changes to come in the next 50 days.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 8:08 AM | Permalink

June 18, 2007

Yahoo's Semel Ousted as CEO

Embattled Yahoo CEO and Chairman Terry Semel has been replaced as CEO by Yahoo founder Jerry Yang. Susan Decker has been named Yahoo's president. The board of directors has replaced Semel, leaving him as non-executive chairman of the board.

ClickZ has more details on the story, and paidContent has notes on Yahoo conference call announcing the changes.

Got any comments on the move, or ideas for changes Yang should make? Share them in the SEW Forums.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 4:33 PM | Permalink

May 30, 2007

Yahoo CTO Retires

"Yahoo!'s CTO, Farzad Nazem, 45, has decided that it's time to take a breather and has announced his retirement. His last official day at Yahoo! will be June 8, 2007", according to the company press release.

"Zod agreed to remain on board to help see Yahoo! through some key milestones including the company and subsequent Technology Group re-design efforts as well as the critical launch of Panama. Zod has established an extremely strong and accomplished leadership team within the technology organization" the press release explained.

"Effective immediately, Jerry Yang has agreed to step in as the interim executive sponsor of the group and will work closely with David Filo and the technology leadership team to continue to drive the technology strategy forward. We will begin an immediate search for a new technology leader.

For additional information on Zod's retirement, please read his post on our corporate blog, Yodel anecdotal: http://yodel.yahoo.com/2007/05/30/eleven-years-12000-yahoos-and-one-great-ride/."

Posted by Frank Watson at 5:56 PM | Permalink

May 15, 2007

Yahoo Names New CFO

Yahoo! announced today it will appoint Blake Jorgensen, the co-founder of Thomas Weisel Partners, as their new Chief Financial Officer. He is scheduled to assume the position June 4th. The previous CFO, Sue Decker, has been named head of advertising and publishing.

The company press release details his experience:

Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced that the Board of Directors has appointed Blake Jorgensen, the co-founder of Thomas Weisel Partners, as chief financial officer. Jorgensen will commence employment with the Company on or about June 4, 2007. Jorgensen will replace Susan Decker, who has moved into a new role as head of the advertiser and publisher group. Jorgensen will be a key member of Yahoo!'s executive team, overseeing the company's finance, investor relations and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) groups. He will report directly to Yahoo!'s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Terry Semel.

"Blake has a strong track record of building and running a successful investment banking franchise serving many clients in the Internet and technology industries. His broad financial, operating and strategic experience, which complements the deep financial expertise of our existing team, will make him a valuable addition to Yahoo!'s senior management," said Semel. "Blake will help Yahoo! continue to execute against our growth plan and identify emerging opportunities, as well as maintain our tradition of financial excellence and fiscal discipline."

Prior to his Yahoo! appointment, Jorgensen was with Thomas Weisel Partners, which he co-founded in 1998 and where he served as chief operating officer, co-director of investment banking and a member of the Executive Committee. In these roles, he was instrumental in managing all aspects of the publicly traded investment bank, working in close partnership with the CEO, members of the Executive Committee and the Board of Directors. Jorgensen also managed the firm's relationships with key investors and managed several strategic alliances with international partners.

Prior to joining Thomas Weisel Partners, Jorgensen was a managing director and principal at the corporate finance department of Montgomery Securities. Earlier in his career, he also worked as an independent management consultant and held roles at MAC Group/Gemini Consulting and Marakon Associates.

Jorgensen holds a Bachelor of Arts from Stanford University with a major in Economics, and a Masters of Business Administration from Harvard Business School.

"I couldn't be happier to be joining Yahoo! to help it achieve a new level of success as an Internet leader. And I'm excited about joining a finance team that, collectively, has such deep functional experience," said Jorgensen. "I believe Yahoo! is well positioned to deliver value to shareholders -- with unique audience, advertising and technology assets and a strong financial base -- and the company is pursuing the right strategy to achieve its great potential. Yahoo! has made significant strides in recent months and I am looking forward to working closely with Terry and the rest of Yahoo!'s impressive management team to continue the company's progress as it aggressively executes against its growth strategy."

Decker assumed her new role as part of the company's reorganization in December 2006. That reorganization was designed to align Yahoo!'s operations with the company's key customer segments -- audiences, advertisers and publishers -- and more effectively leverage Yahoo!'s significant strengths to capture future opportunities for growth.

"Blake's arrival will enable Sue to devote her full attention to her new responsibilities where she is building on the recent momentum we've achieved with Panama, major new partnerships and our agreement to acquire Right Media. With Blake's appointment, we're continuing to put the right people in the right places to execute against our strategy and adding outside talent to complement an already strong management team," added Semel.

Posted by Frank Watson at 10:24 AM | Permalink

April 30, 2007

Yahoo Search VP Leaves for VC Firm

Yahoo's VP of consumer Web search Andrew Braccia has left Yahoo for the greener pastures of venture capital, joining Accel Partners this week as a principal, according to Venture Beat. Accel investments include Brightcove, Coremetrics, Facebook, Medio, and Trulia.

Braccia, who had reported to EVP Jeff Weiner, helped launch Yahoo Answers, and integrate its acquisitions of consumer-facing tools like Delicious and Flickr.

He's been replaced by Vish Makhijani, who most recently served as VP of Yahoo Search Marketing International. Makhijani joined Yahoo with Inktomi, where he was VP and GM of Inktomi Web search.

Back in December, Yahoo saw sweeping changes to its management team, creating three operating groups and shuffling top execs.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 9:03 AM | Permalink

March 22, 2007

Yahoo Renews Click Fraud Prevention Efforts

Yahoo today put a renewed focus on fighting click fraud by appointing Yahoo vet Reggie Davis as the new VP of marketplace quality. Davis has been in Yahoo's legal department for 7 years, with duties that included managing Yahoo's click fraud litigation. He has been tapped to lead a team of cross-functional groups focusing on click fraud and other quality issues.

John Slade, who had been Yahoo's most visible representative in its anti-click fraud efforts, will resume a product-focused role in building out future Yahoo ad products.

In discussing his new role, Davis also shared with SEW that Yahoo's "network discard rate," representing the average number of clicks (in aggregate) that its clickthrough protection filters identify, tag and do not bill to advertisers, is between 12 and 15 percent.

More details on Davis' role can be found in today's SearchDay, "Yahoo Steps Up Click Fraud Efforts."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 2:54 AM | Permalink

March 19, 2007

Yahoo! Loses Another Executive

Deanna Brown, general manager of Yahoo! Media Group's Lifestyles business unit, has been hired by Scripps to head their newly formed Interactive Group.

Brown worked at AOL prior to her coming to Yahoo, and also developed interactive groups for Conde Nast previously. She will report directly to Scripps President John Lansing.

Posted by Frank Watson at 1:04 PM | Permalink

December 7, 2006

Changes at Yahoo Won't Affect Search Marketing Team

With all the changes at Yahoo, it's surprising to note that there won't be too much changing on the search marketing side, at least not yet. Jeff Weiner will continue to lead the group, focusing on rolling out Panama, which remains on time and on-target, according to a spokesperson. His group will be part of the advertiser and publisher group, which will be led by Susan Decker. On the technology side, the search team will continue to report to CTO Farzad Nazem.

To keep up with the changes, wiki-style, check out the latest community-edited org chart on CogMap.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 5:59 PM | Permalink

December 6, 2006

Major Corporate Reorganization at Yahoo!

Significant changes at the executive level and operating groups were revealed last night. Three new divisions will be created, and several top execs will leave the company. Kevin Newcomb over at ClickZ gives a rundown of the changes.

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski at 10:14 AM | Permalink

November 28, 2006

Yahoo China's President Xie Wen Resigns After Six Weeks

PC Advisor reports that Xie Wen, president of Yahoo China, has resigned after only six weeks on the job. Zeng Ming, senior vice-president of Alibaba, will replace Xie, who is resigning for "personal reasons." Xie will stay on as a consultant for Yahoo for an undisclosed time period. This follows on Google China's president apparently announcing he would be resigning earlier this month, though I can't find a more detailed story about that.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:00 AM | Permalink

November 21, 2006

Google Beats Microsoft, Yahoo As College Grad Choice

Online Recruitment reports on a CollegeGrad.com poll showing Google is the most desired place for technology students to work for. The poll asked 1,600 respondents in October "Who would you rather work for?" The results:

Google - 49%
Microsoft - 29%
Yahoo - 12%
IBM - 10%

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:30 AM | Permalink

November 13, 2006

Yahoo Publisher Network Executives Leaving Yahoo

PaidContent.org has confirmation of rumors from Valleywag that two top executives in the Yahoo Publisher Network group are leaving Yahoo. Bill Demas, the Senior VP of Yahoo Publishing Network, is departing Yahoo to "pursue his goal of leading a small company or venture." Also, Will Johnson, VP and GM, of Yahoo Publishing Network won't be with YPN much longer. Yahoo says that Josh Siegel will replace Will Johnson.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:52 AM | Permalink

November 1, 2006

Yahoo's Tim Converse Colors SEOs

Tim Converse, the "spam fighter" at Yahoo, has a fun post he named Search engine optimization (SEO) from black to white. He tries to add nine colors between black and white. For example, a "dark gray" SEO is an SEO that "collects (aka steals) random text from other sites, and uses it to create thousands (or millions) of pages targeting particular queries. The pages have nothing original of value, but do have ads." The new shades of black and white include; Dark inky black, Charcoal, Dark gray, Slate gray, Gray, Light gray, Off-white, White, and Luminescent pearly white.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:12 AM | Permalink

October 20, 2006

Yahoo India's CTO To Join Google As R&D Lead

Steve Bryant reports that Prasad Bhaarat Ram, Yahoo India's CTO, has been hired by Google to lead the research and development office in Bangalore. Dr. Ram said, "It is a great opportunity to join Google and be involved with a company that places such great value on innovation and creativity." Dr. Ram is to begin immediately at Google.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:06 AM | Permalink

September 19, 2006

Yahoo Creating "Brickhouse" Internal Incubator To Keep Talent

GigaOM reports that Yahoo is creating an internal incubator, code named Brickhouse, to give some of Yahoo's talent a place to work without the bureaucracy of a large company. The person running the Brickhouse, love that name by the way, is Flickr founder Caterina Fake. It is apparent that Yahoo knows that hiring new talent is a hard thing to do, but keeping current talent, may be harder -- definitely more important, in my opinion.

Recent high-profile departures from Yahoo?

- YouTube Hires Yahoo's Treasurer, Gideon Yu - Martin Child, VP Of Sales & Marketing Leaves Yahoo Search Marketing - David Beach Leaves Yahoo For Start Up Wink - Former Yahoo Exec Toni Schneider On Life At Automattic - Yahoo Loses Director Of Business Development to FeedBurner - and more available to subscribers of Search Engine Watch here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:16 AM | Permalink

September 4, 2006

YouTube Hires Yahoo's Treasurer, Gideon Yu

TheStreet.com reports on a Wall Street Journal story that YouTube has hired away Yahoo's Treasurer, Gideon Yu. Gideon Yu is to begin working at YouTube this month, Yahoo said he "is taking advantage of what's a good career opportunity for him to step up to another level."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:38 AM | Permalink

August 30, 2006

Yahoo Hiring Up All The Brains

The Wall Street Journal published an article five days ago named Hoping to Overtake Its Rivals, Yahoo Stocks Up on Academics (free article available at Yahoo Research). The article describes how Yahoo is trying to compete with competitors by hiring up all the smartest people out there. About a year ago Danny wrote about The Google Battle For Hiring Tech Talent and if you are a SEW subscriber you can see all of Yahoo's recent hires here. So for now, Yahoo's plan is to hire very bright "Economists and Search Gurus" to get any edge they can against Google and MSN.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:52 AM | Permalink

August 25, 2006

Tim Converse OF Yahoo Talks About Aggregation Spam

Tim Converse, the web spam fighter at Yahoo Search, wrote a very interesting blog entry explaining aggregation spam. In short, aggregation spam is a form of content spam where you scour the web for matches on a specific keyword phrase, then compile a page of content with snippets and chunks of content found containing that keyword phrase and related keywords around it.

Tim offers up this extreme analogy;

Imagine that you get home one night to find a stranger leaving your house with a sack containing your TV, cell phone, jewelry. You might misunderstand, until we explain that he's actually an aggregator - he's just aggregating your belongings.

Tim explains that it is hard for the search engines to draw a fine line in the sand as to what is defined as high-quality aggregation that should be included in the search engines versus those that should not be included. But one thing he personally believes is that the "the bar for inclusion ought to be pretty high."

Read Tim's personal thoughts on aggregation and search at his blog.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:08 AM | Permalink

August 17, 2006

Former Yahoo China Head Sues Yahoo For Defamation

Reuters reports that Zhou Hongyi, the former head of Yahoo China, has sued Yahoo for defamation. Yahoo said they were about to sue Zhou Hongyi for "unethical business practices." Hongyi has a 40 percent stake in Alibaba.com, which was bought by Yahoo for $1 billion last year. To me, it seems like from the article, that Yahoo finds Hongyi to be a shady character, and Hongyi doesn't like Yahoo telling the public how they feel about him.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:20 AM | Permalink

August 16, 2006

The Inside Scoop from Search Bloggers

The major search engines all have unofficial bloggers talking about what's going on in their respective companies. At a recent SES session, search-blog stars Jeremy Zawodny, Gary Price, Matt Cutts and Niall Kennedy all revealed their modus operandi, and guest writer Sara Holoubek was there to capture their insights for today's SearchDay article, Expose: Search Engine Bloggers Tell All.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 7:44 PM | Permalink

August 14, 2006

Yahoo Hires Away comScore Executive

ClickZ reports that Yahoo has hired Peter Daboll, the president and CEO of comScore Media Metrix, to be the chief of insights and head of global market research at Yahoo. Daboll explains that his position was created at Yahoo to "bring together the external world of market research and the wealth of internal data that Yahoo collects." Peter Daboll will be reporting to Cammie Dunaway, Yahoo's chief marketing officer, in Sunnyvale, California.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:50 AM | Permalink

August 10, 2006

The Good & Bad Of Working At Yahoo

Jeremy Zawodny, famed Yahoo blogger, wrote an article that was syndicated at WebProNews named Thoughts About Working At Yahoo. It goes over an other Yahoo's employees thoughts on working at Yahoo after one year of employment there. I thought some of you may find it interesting.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:20 AM | Permalink

July 25, 2006

Yahoo Invests In Social Search Research

Reuters reports Yahoo hired Dr. Raghu Ramakrishnan as vice president and Yahoo research fellow. Dr. Ramakrishnan is a well-respected database expert who has joined Yahoo to study "links between computer and human-aided Web search." Honestly, I am excited what this can potentially mean for social search. Yahoo has so many properties that can be tightly integrated with social search; Flickr, Del.io.us, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Video, web search, desktop search, Yahoo Groups and so on.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:31 AM | Permalink

July 12, 2006

Martin Child, VP Of Sales & Marketing Leaves Yahoo Search Marketing

Brand Republic reports that Yahoo Search Marketing's vice-president of sales and marketing, Martin Child is leaving to work at Webloyalty. Child has been with Yahoo, Overture, for four and a half years prior to stepping down.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:43 AM | Permalink

June 28, 2006

David Beach Leaves Yahoo For Start Up Wink

Brian Smith notes that the senior product manager of Yahoo Shopping Search, David Beach, has decided to leave Yahoo after five years. Beach confirmed his departure from Yahoo on his blog, stating that Yahoo could not provide "the kind of opportunity that Wink is providing." Wink, a social search engine, "analyzes tags and submissions from Digg, Furl, Slashdot, Yahoo MyWeb, and other services, plus user-imported tags from del.icio.us, and favorites marked at Wink, and figure out which pages are most relevant through our TagRank (tm) algorithms." Should be a fun move for Beach.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:44 AM | Permalink

June 21, 2006

Microsoft Employees Use Google More Than MSN?

Philipp Lenssen reported on a Andrew Hitchcock post that detailed search engine usage by search engine firm. It appears that Microsoft employees prefer Google to MSN Search when searching the web. At Microsoft 66.31 percent use Google, 19.65 percent use MSN and 10.18 percent use Yahoo. Yahoo employees aren't afraid to use Google search either, with 29.80 percent of searches conducted on Google and 68.87 percent on Yahoo Search. Google employees seem to be 100 percent loyal to Google search, based on the data.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:48 AM | Permalink

May 17, 2006

Google Adding More Jobs Than Yahoo

BusinessWeek.com reports that Google is adding more jobs than Yahoo. Google has 1,800 open positions this year, up from 800 open positions last year. Yahoo has 800 openings this year, but they have declined from last year, with 935 job openings. Google is also higher a higher percentage of employees overseas, with 51% of their job openings based outside of the U.S. Yahoo has 29% of their job openings based overseas, up 15% from last year. Yahoo still has more employees than Google, with 10,098 employees at Yahoo and 6,790 employees at Google.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:59 AM | Permalink

April 28, 2006

Former Yahoo Exec Toni Schneider On Life At Automattic

Yahoo's had a number of executives depart to start-ups and smaller companies recently. Toni Schneider was one of them, leaving last January. Swapping job security for a startup at Business 2.0 has John Battelle talking with him about making the move to Automattic.

It's interesting to hear that despite the sale of Oddpost for $29 million, which Schneider headed, he still has to work for a living. Also interesting was his redefinition of comment spam as "web spam" and how fighting it with the Akismet service that Automattic runs is a revenue source.

I'm sorry -- I just can't help myself over the irony of Automattic making money fighting comment spam while just over a year ago, the company's WordPress side got dinged for making money through search spam.

I know, I know. Just let it go. Certainly Automattic's new direction and recent funding probably means they won't find themselves going the search spam route again, accidentally, inadvertently or otherwise. And goodness knows the irony remains even bigger about Google's Blogger service generating plenty of search spam that it in turn has to fight.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:09 PM | Permalink

April 17, 2006

Yahoo Adds New Senior Managers

News.com reports that Yahoo has named Ash Patel as Yahoo's new chief product officer and Qi Lu as Yahoo's senior president of engineering for search and marketing. Ash Patel will report to COO Dan Rosensweig with his responsibility being in global product strategy and development. Qi Lu will report to Farzad Nazem, Yahoo's CTO.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 1:50 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Executives Exercise Almost $300 Million Shares In 2005

Reuters reports, as does the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), that Yahoo executives have exercised almost $300 million in stock options in 2005. Terry Semel, Yahoo's CEO earned $173.6 million in 2005 by selling off around 7 million shares. He has a remaining $236.1 million worth of unexercised options. CTO, Farzad Nazem sold off 1.8 million shares netting $63.8 million. Susan Decker earned $30.9 million by selling about one million options. And Yahoo's COO, Daniel Rosensweig netted $25.6 million by exercising 912,000 options.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:59 AM | Permalink

April 6, 2006

Search Technologists Flake & Broder Speak There are two good interviews with search technologists out there for us to read. John Battelle posted A Frank Interview with Gary Flake yesterday. Battelle introduces Gary Flake as "a veteran of Overture, Yahoo and now Microsoft's vaunted research labs (he's founder and director of the new "Live Labs.")" Also about a month ago, the Yahoo Search Blog posted "A chat with Andrei Broder" Part I, Part II and Part III. Andrei Broder was the VP of research and chief scientist at AltaVista, and is now the Yahoo Research Fellow and Vice President of Emerging Search Technology.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:38 AM | Permalink

March 15, 2006

Yahoo Grants 1.3 Million Options to CEO, Terry Semel

MarketWatch reports that Terry Semel, the CEO of Yahoo, has been granted 1.3 million stock options from his company. The options have an "exercise price" of $40.68, which is about $10 above Tuesday's closing price of $30.99. These options are set to expire March 10, 2013. Semel was also granted 7.2 million options in 2004, according to the San Jose Business Journal.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 1:27 PM | Permalink

Nutch's Doug Cutting Joins Yahoo Full Time After Serving Four Years Independently

Jeremy Zawodny notes that Doug Cutting, who has been working at Yahoo for four-years as an independent contractor, as now signed on with Yahoo full time, as an employee. Doug will most likely continue working from home on his open source projects; Lucene, Hadoop and Nutch. So while Yahoo loses some employees, they gain some as well.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:24 AM | Permalink

March 14, 2006

Yahoo Loses Director Of Business Development to FeedBurner

FeedBurner announced they have hired Don Loeb, former director of business development for Yahoo's Network Products business unit. Loeb will be the Vice President of Business Development, Strategic Partnerships at FeedBurner. At Yahoo he was responsible for My Yahoo, Yahoo 360, Yahoo Groups and some other Yahoo social networking products, an area that Yahoo has been putting forth a lot of efforts.

Don Loeb wrote why he is leaving at his blog, saying;

Over the past three years, media fragmentation has rapidly accelerated as consumers have become their own programmers and, increasingly, publishers themselves. Yahoo led the way in developing some of the key user experiences (my yahoo, flickr, del.icio.us, etc.) that drove this consumer behavior shift. FeedBurner is also at the heart of this ever-changing media landscape. but, our focus is on helping publishers of all shapes and sizes navigate this new world ? where syndication, subscriptions, and user generated content play ever more important roles.

This adds to the list of Yahoo executives leaving Yahoo over the past year or so. We watched Geoff Ralston, Rob Solomon, Toni Schneider, David Mandelbrot and John Glick all leave Yahoo for other companies.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 1:35 PM | Permalink

March 1, 2006

Yahoo Sues Ex-Employee for Stolen Trade Secrets

Yahoo Sues Ex-Employee for Stolen Trade Secrets - Yahoo sues former workers, alleging trade secrets were stolen from the AP covers allegations that a former Yahoo employee allegedly provided "entertainment and information tailored for wireless phones" information to MForma Group Inc.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:16 AM | Permalink

February 21, 2006

Do or Die for Yahoo's Braun?

Stefanie Olsen of News.com reports that the Head of Yahoo! Media Group, Lloyd Braun has been under a lot of heat to help Yahoo's Media Group compete. Stefanie Olsen says since Braun's hire in November 2004, he has not been able to "adapt his Hollywood know-how to the digital world." Olsen says, "Yahoo's plan to become a major Internet content player is treading water." Some believe this is do or die time for Braun.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:42 AM | Permalink

January 26, 2006

Yahoo's Senior VP of Engineering to Become Chief Product Officer

Over on Gigaom, Om Malik reports that Yahoo will name Ash Patel, the senior VP of engineering as their new chief product officer (CPO). Patel will replace Geoff Ralston, who according to Malik, is leaving for "parts unknown."

Om writes: I sat next to Ash, and got into a spirited discussion about why Yahoo is really all about My.Yahoo.Com. My contention is that forget search, because Yahoo has something better than that. My.Yahoo.Com is no longer a portal page, but instead an ?attention page? which can be and should be leveraged to become the aggregator site for complicated digital life. Ash, who spent a lot of time on that particular page - building it I mean - agreed.

I wonder what, if any plans, Yahoo has for their uncluttered and ad-free search interface at Search.yahoo.com. In the past year they have modules with news headlines, email access, and stock index info. In many ways it has the potential to be a My Yahoo Lite that could also work on Yahoo's mobile platform. It would also be useful to offer a module with recommended posts (personalization) from feeds you subscribe too? How about allowing developers the chance to build modules for this page? This page already allows the user to customize which search tabs are visible. Although in the past few months they have made it a challenge to do this. One thing is for sure, when I show the Search.yahoo.com page to end users during presentations, I almost always here and audible "oooh and aaah" with people going on to say that they had no clue that it existed and they're thrilled to know about it.

Om also reports that Yahoo Instant Messenger for the Mac (aka Mac Communicator) should be coming soon.

Bow, the departure of Geoff Ralston is yet another Yahoo exec leaving. In the past few weeks we've blogged about several others departing Yahoo including:

Posted by Gary Price at 6:49 PM | Permalink

January 25, 2006

Yahoo Does Want To Be The Leading Search Engine

Are you kidding?! at the Yahoo Search Blog has Yahoo giving the official word that they do want to be the leader in search:

We thought it made sense to briefly recap how focused we are in search and our passion to be the world's leading search engine

The post goes on to talk about the technology Yahoo's acquired and built, the smart group of people they have behind that (and they are smart), ways Yahoo's trying to innovate especially in the social space and how Yahoo's reaching out to developers.

The post was sparked after much commentary erupted following the news that Yahoo's CFO Susan Decker was quoted as saying the company didn't have as a goal to be number one in internet search.

Some pushback came that Decker's quote was somehow taken out of context. I disagree. Let's look at it again:

"We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google," Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."

I thought the context was perfectly clear. Yahoo doesn't expect to take market share away from Google. As I wrote in my piece yesterday, that's not the same as saying they don't want to be number one in search quality, that they don't care about search or had given up on search. It was actually a fairly honest assessment, aimed at investing types that Yahoo isn't advising that they are going to pull many people away from their Google habit.

In other words, get off our backs about the comScore/NetRatings/Hitwise whatever stats you just got sent. They aren't going to change much (nor as I posted yesterday, have they).

Perhaps Decker went on further in the interview to talk more about Yahoo being committed to search in other ways. But I talked with the Bloomberg reporter for some time about the interview he'd conducted. It didn't sound like that aspect came up or was somehow cut-off from what he wrote. Importantly, the Yahoo Search Blog itself hasn't offered this up as explanation. If Decker or Yahoo felt the comments were taken out of context, that would have been in the Yahoo Search Blog post.

In short, I think Decker's comments were clear. Although they were about marketshare, that unfortunately does spill over into commitment overall, as I wrote yesterday. The commentary and discussion that erupted over the comments was warranted, though some of the headlines I saw were definitely over the top.

I was planning to do a "How About Some Love For Yahoo" post especially in reaction to comments by Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny and Caterina Fake, both of whom are involved in the frontline battle for searchers that Yahoo's waging. These people are dedicated, involved and have no intention to be number two in anything, as you can read in their posts. And they, like others at Yahoo, are doing all the things that the Yahoo Search Blog covers and more.

Goodness knows I've been dubious about social search and tagging. But that's more from trying to stress that it's a partial solution to improving search rather than the total solution some assume. Yahoo's being extremely innovative in this area, and that's a strength. They are smart in other ways, as well. Aside from that, they are an excellent search engine overall. Heck, they won as Outstanding Search Service from us last year. I certainly don't want them aiming for number two. I want them to be challenging Google full-force, because that type of competition means both Google and Yahoo will be better.

On the front lines, I know they're battling hard. Then generals above them need to ensure they're delivering the right message to support those troops. That doesn't mean lie or be unrealistic. Don't tell the financial markets you'll steal Google's market share away. But yes, if search is a major part of your service, you really should have it as your goal to be number one in market share. You shouldn't be "very happy" to maintain what you've got. You should be happy to maintain what you have, explain it will be a tough battle to gain more, but that ultimately you'd like to see that happen in the long term.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forums thread, Yahoo: We're OK Being Number Two.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:57 AM | Permalink

January 23, 2006

Yahoo Open New Research Labs in Chile and Spain with Respected Information Scientist In Charge

News from Yahoo that they have just opened new research labs in Chile and Spain. Yahoo has hired famed information scientist, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, to run these new facilities.

I've been monitoring Dr. Baeza-Yates web site for years looking for new research papers. If IR is of interest, this is one personal home page full of interesting material.

Thanks to Erin at Search Views for the news tip. More in this Financial Times article and official news release.

Yahoo has been steadily and impressively ramping up its research efforts in terms of new facilities and some very key hires:

+ Yahoo Opens NYC Research Center

+ Andrei Broder Joins Yahoo

+ Prabhakar Raghavan Hired To Lead Yahoo Research

+ Yahoo Announces New Research Laboratory (at UC Berkeley)

Btw, in November, Google opened a Latin American research center in Brazil.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:17 PM | Permalink

January 19, 2006

Former Head of Marketing for Yahoo, Search UK and Ireland Now at TouchLocal, a UK Business Directory

A brief item from the UK's Netimperative reporting that Karl Gregory, the ex-head of marketing for Yahoo, Search UK & Ireland is now employed at Touch Local, a UK business directory where he will be responsible for acquisition and making sure businesses connect in an effective way with customers.

The article says that while he was at Yahoo, his main task was growing Yahoo Search, UK and Ireland.

Earlier this week, Danny posted about Yahoo VP, Rob Solomon, leaving the company to go lead SideStep. Last week, I blogged about Toni Schneider, the VP in charge of the Yahoo Developer Network, leaving for the blog publishing startup, Automattic. I postscripted that item with news that David Mandelbrot, the former VP of Content at Yahoo Search, left the company in early November.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:40 PM | Permalink

January 17, 2006

Yahoo Loses Another VP, This Time To SideStep

Ouch. Last week, Yahoo saw the vice president in charge of its developer network split to start-up Automattic. Now there's news that another Yahoo vice president has departed. This time it's Rob Solomon, who was vice president and general manager of Yahoo Shopping. He's heading over to travel search engine SideStep, to become the new president and CEO. You'll find a relatively recent interview with Rob from his Yahoo days here at ComparisonEngines.com. The release isn't up yet at SiteStep's press release area yet, so here's what we were sent:

Yahoo! Executive Appointed CEO of SideStep Rob Solomon to Run Travel Search Leader

SANTA CLARA, Calif. January 16, 2006 SideStep, the traveler's search engine, announced that Rob Solomon has been chosen as the company's new president and chief executive officer. Solomon has also been named to SideStep's board of directors. He was formerly vice president and general manager of the Yahoo! Shopping Group (YHOO), where he was instrumental in building one of the largest commerce destinations on the Internet.

Solomon's vertical search expertise is considerable, having significantly grown one of the Web's premiere vertical search sites Yahoo! Shopping. Additionally, he brings extensive experience in the travel industry to SideStep, having run Yahoo!'s travel business. Solomon was with Yahoo! for six years.

"Rob Solomon has the track record and ingenuity to strengthen SideStep's position as the leader in travel search and ultimately continue to transform the online travel market," said Jim Barnett, SideStep's chairman of the board. "A veteran of portal and search wars, Rob has seen and touched all aspects of Yahoo!'s business from startup to hyper-growth. He possesses the knowledge and leadership to take SideStep to the next level and capitalize on a search engine on the verge of mass expansion."

SideStep leads the travel search category, one of the hottest sectors of the $63.5 billion online travel industry (PhoCusWright). SideStep.com searches hundreds of travel brands to find flight, hotel, rental car and vacation bargains around the globe. In addition, it generates approximately $1 billion in gross bookings annually for its partners.

"SideStep is an innovative company with a strong heritage a six year history that began with creating the vertical search market," said Solomon. "I believe in its mission to revolutionize the online travel search sector and look forward to leading the executive team to continue to define and extend a leadership role within the category."

Solomon brings a blend of consumer, commerce, travel and Internet search experience to SideStep. Having served as a Yahoo! corporate officer, Solomon has proven strategy, product and leadership skills. He was instrumental in driving major accolades for Yahoo! including, Shopping Search Engine of the Year (Search Engine Watch) and top ratings in key Comparison Shopping Reports (Consumer Reports and Forbes). He brings relevant experience from top companies such as consumer technology leader Electronic Arts and travel services powerhouse Cendant Corp. A UC Berkeley graduate, Solomon begins his new post on January 23, 2006.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:46 AM | Permalink

January 12, 2006

Yahoo VP In Charge of Yahoo Developer Network Leaves Company for Startup

Om Malik reports that Toni Schneider, the VP in charge of the Yahoo Developer Network and, according to Malik, also helped with the Konfabultor (Yahoo Widgets) acquisition and in helping Yahoo to "flickrize", is leaving Sunnyvale to be the CEO of start-up named Automattic, a company that is set to offer blogging services. Om's exclusive is confirmed by Toni with additional info on his own blog.

Postscript: David Mandelbrot is another Yahoo VP who recently left the company. Mandelbrot was the vice president of search content. He left the company in early November. He worked on numerous projects including Creative Commons search and Yahoo's membership in the Open Content Alliance.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:14 PM | Permalink

January 4, 2006

Bill Gates Keynote Address at Consumer Electronic Show Will be Webcast Tonight; CES Podcasts via Yahoo

As many of you know, the Consumer Electronics Show begins today in Las Vegas with keynote presentations from Bill Gates, Terry Semel, and Larry Page. You can view a live webcast of the Bill Gates keynote address live, beginning at 6:30 PM/PST tonight. What will he have to say about search? I'm sure an archived version of the video and a text transcript will be available soon after the speech concludes.

On Friday, Yahoo's Terry Semel speaks at 9am PST and Google's Larry Page addresses a CES audience at 4pm PST.

At the moment, I can't find any links to where webcasts of the speeches by Semel and Page will be available. If I do, I'll add them to this post as a postsript. Often, presentations from Yahoo execs are linked here and Google speeches here.

On a somewhat related note, Yahoo is offering various podcasts and from CES via their podcast service. It's accessible here.

Update: Yahoo CEO Terry Semel's keynote address on Friday will be vidcast. You can find all of the details here.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:28 PM | Permalink

December 20, 2005

Yahoo's Mayer and Zawodny Ready to Debut New Webcast/Podcast on Webmaster Radio

Daron Babin, the man in charge of Webmaster Radio (the people who help us bring you our Daily Searchcast), has let us know that two very well-known members of the Yahoo Search team, Tim Mayer and Jeremy Zawodny will host a new webcast/podcast that will debut on Wednesday (December 21st) night at 8pm EST.

"Power Source" is the name of the new show and it will be webcast the last Wednesday of each month at 8pm EST and then be available as a podcast. According to Daron, the show will be full of commentary about the valley's newest and hottest companies, interviews with insiders, and much more. The very best of luck to Tim and Jeremy on the new show. We're very much looking forward to listening.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:18 PM | Permalink

November 30, 2005

Google Looking For Interactive TV Engineers; Yahoo Needs Search Relevance and Monetization Researcher

Yes, it's time for another Google TV job posting!

This time for engineers. The title of the job is: Software Engineer, Television Technology - Mountain View and Google is looking for, "well-rounded software engineers with a proven track record in creating and deploying robust high-volume interactive TV applications and services."

In September, Danny blogged about a posting discovered by Adam Lasnik to be a product manager for Google TV. A couple of days later, I went looking for the posting and it was gone, never to be seen again.

Now, over to Yahoo. How's this for a job title: + Search Relevance and Monetization Researcher As a Search Relevance and Monetization Researcher, you will help to improve the relevance and revenue of our Web search and sponsored search products.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:25 PM | Permalink

November 29, 2005

Yahoo Sponsored Search Simulation Job & Google After API Developer Relation Specialist

You know me, I'm always perusing job listings to see if I can spot interesting positions of tnterest to SEW Blog Readers or new services/trends that might be coming soon. Today, two interesting job openings popped up, one involving "sponsored search simulation" at Yahoo and the other at Google to help reach out to developers.

First, over at Yahoo. How's this for a job title: Engineering Manager - Sponsored Search Simulation

You've heard of war games, well now it's search games:

We are looking for a highly technical, hands on, experienced manager to lead the Marketplace Simulation and Forecasting project in Yahoo Search Marketing...You will be responsible for leading a small team of engineers and analysts, working closely with software architects, business and product managers, to build out a robust, reliable, high performance platform to be used in the testing, evaluation, and forecast of new marketplace design features.

Meanwhile, a few exits away in Mountain View at Google...

Google: Developer Relations Specialist - Mountain View

Are you interested in promoting Google's API's and open source initiatives? Google says:

Google is looking for a candidate who can advocate Google open source technologies and APIs to developers and create vibrant communities around them. The candidate will be responsible for the overall planning, budgeting, execution and success of developer outreach projects and will work primarily with Google engineering. Secondarily, the candidate will act as a liaison with our Legal, PR/Marketing and recruiting personnel.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:48 PM | Permalink

November 25, 2005

The Google Battle For Hiring Tech Talent (Yahoo Sez They Win)

From the Wall Street Journal, Google ignites hiring frenzy is yet another article on how Google and other companies are after tech talent. This has a few more details and more depth about the Google recruiting juggernaut and "Google Stock Units" that are offered. Yahoo says they've won the majority of head-to-head battles over candidates.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:58 AM | Permalink

November 18, 2005

Andrei Broder Joins Yahoo

Andrei Broder, former vice president of research at AltaVista and until recently Distinguished Engineer & CTO, IBM Research, is joining Yahoo as research fellow and vice president of emerging search technology at Yahoo Research, according to this News.com article.

Broder has been involved in a wide-range of research activities related to the web and information retrieval, including the famous "bow-tie" study of web size and connectivity, and the web archaeology project together with other-well known researchers Krishna Bharat (Google news) and Monika Henzinger (Google research).

Postscript from Gary: Here's a list with a few research papers and articles that Broder has authored or co-authored that might be of interest.

Title: A Taxonomy of Web Search Author: Andrei Broder Source: ACM SIGIR Forum 8 pages; PDF Abstract: "Classic IR (information retrieval) is inherently predicated on users searching for information, the socalled "information need". But the need behind a web search is often not informational -- it might be navigational (give me the url of the site I want to reach) or transactional (show me sites where I can perform a certain transaction, e.g. shop, download a file, or find a map). We explore this taxonomy of web searches and discuss how global search engines evolved to deal with web-specific needs."

Title: Sampling Search-Engine Results Authors: Aris Anagnostopoulos, Andrei Z. Broder, David Carmel Source: WWW 14 Conference (2005) 12 pages; PDF. From the abstract: We consider the problem of efficiently sampling Web search engine query results. In turn, using a small random sample instead of the full set of results leads to efficient approximate algorithms for several applications, such as: ? Determining the set of categories in a given taxonomy spanned by the search results; ? Finding the range of metadata values associated to the result set in order to enable ?multi-faceted search;? ? Estimating the size of the result set; ? Data mining associations to the query terms. -- Title: Sic Transit Gloria Telae: Towards an Understanding of the Web's Decay Source: WWW 13 Conference (2004) Authors: Z. BarYossef, A. Broder, R. Kumar and A. Tomkins 10 pages; PDF. From the Abstract: "The rapid growth of the web has been noted and tracked extensively. Recent studies have however documented the dual phenomenon: web pages have small half lives, and thus the web exhibits rapid death as well. Consequently, page creators are faced with an increasingly burdensome task of keeping links up-to-date, and many are falling behind. In addition to just individual pages, collections of pages or even entire neighborhoods of the web exhibit significant decay, rendering them less effective as information resources. Such neighborhoods are identified only by frustrated searchers, seeking a way out of these stale neighborhoods, back to more up-to-date sections of the web; measuring the decay of a page purely on the basis of dead links on the page is too naive to reflect this frustration." -- Title: Towards the next generation of enterprise search technology Authors: A. Z. Broder and A. C. Ciccolo Source: IBM Systems Journal (2004) Abstract: "Unstructured information represents the vast majority of data collected and accessible to enterprises. Exploiting this information requires systems for managing and extracting knowledge from large collections of unstructured data and applications for discovering patterns and relationships. This paper elucidates the differences between search systems for the Web and those for enterprises, with an emphasis on the future of enterprise search systems. It also introduces the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) and provides the context for the unstructured information management (UIM) papers that follow." -- Title: A technique for measuring the relative size and overlap of public Web search engines Authors: Krishna Bharat and Andrei Broder Source: WWW 7 Conference From the Abstract: " Search engines are among the most useful and popular services on the Web. Users are eager to know how they compare. Which one has the largest coverage? Have they indexed the same portion of the Web? How many pages are out there? Although these questions have been debated in the popular and technical press, no objective evaluation methodology has been proposed and few clear answers have emerged. In this paper we describe a standardized, statistical way of measuring search engine coverage and overlap through random queries."

Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:25 PM | Permalink

November 17, 2005

Yahoo Search Marketing Searches for a Content Specialist

I spend some time each week reviewing job openings at Yahoo, Google, and other search companies. Sometimes, these listings can provide clues to "new projects" the company might be working on. However, most of the time, it's just a company in search of an employee. I believe that's the case with this "just posted" position for a Content Specialist at Yahoo Search Marketing in Pasadena. The job might be of interest to some of you.

From the listing: The Content Specialist analyzes Web sites, researches and identifies relevant search terms, and uses Overture's cutting edge technology to create effective search marketing campaigns for new and existing clients. Works closely with multiple Sales Teams to strategize methods for enhancing CTR and ROI as well as resolve client inquiries and disputes. Works with Customer Services to resolve client issues as necessary. Occasionally, the Content Specialist will interact directly with key advertisers helping to explain where opportunities sit within their online marketing portfolio and how Overture can assist them in driving valuable traffic to their websites.

You'll find the complete job listing here.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:46 PM | Permalink

November 14, 2005

Yahoo Culture: Sunnyvale & Santa Monica

In Chris Gaither's LA Times (free, reg. required) article, Can Yahoo Sign On to Hollywood?, you'll read about the very different cultures at Yahoo's office in Santa Monica (aka Hollywood) versus their Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale (aka Silicon Valley).

But as Yahoo strives to enter the league of Walt Disney Co., Viacom Inc. and other media giants, success hinges on its ability to merge two inherently different cultures: the brash, flashy ethos of entertainment executives and the rumpled, brainiac realm of computer nerds.

In the year since the company consolidated its Santa Monica office and began hiring a slew of former Hollywood executives bent on "convergence," Yahoo's leaders have sought to downplay the tensions. But the union has sometimes been rocky.

In Sunnyvale, it's "a cubicle society," said a person close to Yahoo, referring to the willingness of people at all levels to work in cramped workstations. Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from Yahoo, this person said the Santa Monica office, by contrast, was about " 'How big is my office? Where is my parking spot? You report to me. I don't need to talk to you.' It's very much the studio hierarchy mentality."

Btw, the article also includes a quote from Senior VP of Search and Marketplace, Jeff Weiner on just what kind of company Yahoo is: "We're often asked, 'Is Yahoo a media company or a tech company?' said Jeff Weiner, a Yahoo senior vice president and former Warner Bros. executive who runs the search and marketplace groups. "The answer to that is: 'We're both. We're a media business that is technology driven.' "

Also on Search: Consequently, search has become a big part of Yahoo's media strategy ? it's the launch pad for many people to find video, music and websites ? and a big revenue generator. Yahoo is locked in a battle with Google to persuade movie studios and television companies to release their material to search engines ? one arena in which Yahoo's show-business connections are supposed to pay off.

A very interesting read.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:49 PM | Permalink

November 9, 2005

Yahoo's Ass Kicking Statue Controversy

This was one of those, "should I skip it" decisions, but I did find it interesting. Phillip at Google Blogoscoped in Yahoo in Battle Mode summarizes how Yahoo's mail team was given a statue (yep, there's even a picture) for "kicking an enemy's ass." That would be Google's bottom being whacked, specifically.

Phillip then points to Google's Kevin Fox having long commentary on the statue. Kevin used to be at Yahoo, and he does a compare and contrast feeling that Google's about making better products while Yahoo's focused on "how to beat Google" and finds the competition goes too far with the statue's comparison to Britain fighting Nazi Germany.

The comments after Kevin's post go all over the place and are fun to read -- pro-Yahoo, anti-Yahoo, pro-Google, anti-Google. Phillip also points to two Yahoo employees who comment on the statue as well (Ryan Kennedy suggests a toned-down description for the statue; this employee prefers the "be humble" approach).

Yahoo's new email interface is way, way cool (double verified by checking with my wife, who is a regular user) -- but honestly, the old system was already kicking Google's butt for the simple fact that anyone could sign-up for it without getting someone to send you an invite or having to get text messaged a secret code. When Gmail's freely open to anyone, then let the weigh-up really take place.

Speaking of statues, how about Yahoo putting a little message on the Bob's Big Boy statue that Chris and I came across in one of the Yahoo buildings when visiting this summer. I'll see about getting the photo off Chris's phone -- I made him stand there and take it. But it looks just like this, except the hamburger was replaced with the Inktomi logo.

Bob's an old friend I remember well, from my days of visiting Inktomi. He was in the lobby, and I'd sit next to him waiting for someone to come meet me.

If memory serves, Inktomi founder Eric Brewer bought him to represent the serving/caching service that Inktomi used to provide. When Yahoo bought Inktomi, Bob came over -- and apparently was nearly tossed out until someone gave him a home.

He deserves a better home and maybe his own message devoted to the Yahoo web search team -- those from Inktomi, plus the AltaVista and FAST/AllTheWeb vets. They assembled a great product that directly rivals Google's core search results. Heck, put Bob out in the main entrance of Yahoo! Just make the message praising the efforts without dissing the competition, and I suppose everyone will be happy.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:58 AM | Permalink

October 31, 2005

Review: Google and Yahoo Hiring Booms

Those of you who look at our blog regularly know that we try to post interesting and "telling" job openings at Google, Yahoo, and elsewhere. Chris has already blogged about Google WILL hire programs to support Open Office despite reports to the contrary. That's part of the story. This afternoon, Elinor Mills at News.com talks about the hiring rampages at both Google and Yahoo in the article: Google hiring like it's 1999.

In its most recent quarter, which ended Sept. 30, Google added 800 employees, bringing its global work force to 4,989. That's more than triple the total from just two years ago.

Btw, Google employed 2668 as of Sept 30, 2004.

According to Hoover's, Yahoo had more than 7600 employees in 2004, growing about 38%.

Here's a quick review of a few (and I mean just a few) recent Google and Yahoo job related stories and employment postings from various sources: + Via News.com: Google Hires New Public-Affairs Chief + Via News.com: Google hires another China exec

+ Via SEW Blog: Google Hiring Mac Developers + Via SEW Blog: Google Begins Hiring for Some Sort of Facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan + Via SEW Blog: Google Seeks Sales Team For Payment Solution + Via SEW Blog: Google TV Job Posting: Gone After a Day Online

And some very recent postings: + Google: Creative Maximizer Coordinator Now, that's a job title! Work in Chicago! + Google: Gmail Coordinator and Froogle Coordinators (Temp Jobs) + Google: Inside Sales Representative, Google Payment Solutions - New York + Google: Google Earth Inside Sales Representative

+ Yahoo: AJAX Web Developer - My Yahoo + Yahoo: Senior Editor, Yahoo! Tech: Yahoo! Inc + Yahoo: Yahoo! Research Scientist, Search Content Analysis Team + Yahoo: Product Manager, Yahoo! Search Submit + Yahoo: Product Manager, Yahoo! Global Search Syndication + Yahoo: Principal Software Engineer - Chinese Search Technology + Yahoo: Director, UED for PC Client -- Yahoo!

Posted by Gary Price at 7:59 PM | Permalink

October 21, 2005

Ted Meisel Leaving Yahoo

Ted Meisel is one of the smartest, far-thinking people I know in the search ads space. He should be, as the last president of Overture, before it was purchased by Yahoo and turned into Yahoo Search Marketing. Now Meisel, senior VP at Yahoo who has continued running Yahoo Search Marketing, is leaving.

Changes at the Top at Yahoo! Search and Ad Sales Units at ClickZ has more about the move, announced as part of Yahoo's earning call earlier this week. Meisel leaves at the end of the year. ClickZ reports Yahoo saying he's leaving to "recharge, spend time with his family, and pursue public policy interests."

Let's hope Yahoo's got some good lock-in on what Ted might want to do after he's feeling a bit more recharged, lest he decide to perhaps take up a new challenge with MSN or Google. In the outright war over search talent that's been going on, he's a heavy hitter now departing the playing field.

Gregory Coleman will pick up oversight of Yahoo Search Marketing's ad sales side as executive vice president of global ad sales. Jeff Weiner, Yahoo senior vice president of search and marketplace, will oversee product development aspects of paid search. More also from the New York Times here and AdWeek here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:26 AM | Permalink

October 17, 2005

Yahoo Adds New Member to Technology Development Group

Yahoo, like their competitors, continues adding new members (it's a recruiting war out there folks) to their staff. Just this evening, JZ himself (Jeremy Zawodny) posts on the addition of Tom Coates to the Yahoo Technology Development Group led by Bradley Horowitz. He comes to Yahoo via the BBC and a long list of well-known employers including UpMyStreet.com, emap, Time Out, and has also written for The Guardian.

So, what will Mr.Coates be doing at Yahoo?

From his blog: My particular special skill - I gather - is going to be the power of my social media mojo, undercut with my feral design instincts. I'll be based in London but out in the States pretty regularly - and here's the best bit - playing with the Flickr team and the Upcoming crew and all the folks over at Yahoo Research Berkeley (among others).

This is the second recruitment item I blogged today The other post was about Google recruiting the lead developer of GAIM, an open-source IM client to work at their Seattle facility.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:33 PM | Permalink

October 5, 2005

Court Says Yahoo Speech Engineers Can Continue Working

A California judge has not issued a restraining order and 12 speech software engineers at Yahoo will be able to continue their work for the time being. The other day I blogged about Nuance, a speech tech company, filing a lawsuit against Yahoo saying that a group of engineers that moved from Nuance to Yahoo were now providing Yahoo with trade secrets. A hearing about the case is schedule on November 14th.

The order issued Monday in Santa Clara County Superior Court said the court was unable to properly assess whether any wrongdoing had occurred, and therefore declined to grant Nuance's request for a temporary restraining order against Yahoo and the engineers.

"We are pleased with the result today that the court did not grant the request for a temporary restraining order," Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo said in a statement. "We continue to believe the allegations in the lawsuit are without merit, and we plan to continue a vigorous defense."

Posted by Gary Price at 1:18 PM | Permalink

October 4, 2005

Search Engine Employees Appear on Technology Innovators Under 35 List

I was reviewing the new Technology Review list of top innovators under the age of 35 (the TR35) and came across three names in the search, online info business. Make sure tointeresting. review the complete list, a very interesting read. A tip o' the SEW Blog cap to:

+ Stewart Butterfield, 32 Flickr/Yahoo

+ Dennis Crowley, 29 dodgeball (acquired by Google)

+ David Pennock, 34 Yahoo Research

Others on the list include Bram Cohen (BitTorrent) and Regina Barzilay, 34 (MIT). During her time at Columbia University, Barzilay helped develop the automatic news summarizer, NewsBlaster. The service remains online today.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:51 PM | Permalink

October 3, 2005

Yahoo Accused of Trying to Steal Trade Secrets

It seems like everyday we have a story involving lawyers, courts, and search companies Today, is no different. News.com reports that Nuance Communications, a California speech technology company, has asked a California court to place a temporarily restraining order on about 12 speech engineers who left Nuance and are now doing interactive speech work at Yahoo. The lawsuit claims that Yahoo is trying to steal trade secrets.

In its court documents, Nuance alleges that Yahoo "gutted" its research and development unit and hired away 13 of its engineers. Nuance also alleges that its former vice president of research and development, Larry Heck, helped Yahoo hire a dozen of his engineering staff.

"We think the complaint is completely without merit and we are going to defend ourselves vigorously," said Yahoo spokeswoman Kiersten Hollars. She declined to offer further comment.

Btw, did you Yahoo offers a service called Yahoo by Phone that allows you to get sports scores, weather, contact info (from your contact folder), and even listen to your email (not just Yahoo Mail) over the telephone? It costs $4.95/month.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:25 PM | Permalink

Google After SEM Execs To Woo & Train Agencies?

Google Searches for SEM Talent at ClickZ covers how various search marketing firms are reporting that Google's after their execs apparently to beef up its agency outreach. It follows on a recent Yahoo hire.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:43 PM | Permalink

September 21, 2005

Want to Be a Relevance Analyst?

If you're in search-related job, here are two that just might be relevant. (-: The other day I learned that Yahoo Search Marketing has posted two openings for Relevance Analysts (part of the Relevance Assessment Team) at the Yahoo Search Marketing hq in Pasadena.

What would you do? The primary responsibility of the Relevance Analyst will be to test new and existing matching technologies by scoring listings from a relevance perspective and providing feedback on the results.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:22 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Search Marketing Hires Ron Belanger

It was just a month ago when Danny posted that Ron Belanger had left Carat Interactive to take a job be vice president of marketing for BuyDomains. Well, Ron's time at BuyDomains was short. According to this press release from Yahoo Search Marketing, Belanger is now the Senior Director of Global Advertiser Strategy and Development at YSM.

In his new role, Ron will be an ambassador to clients and agencies, serving as an expert resource in helping them effectively incorporate search marketing into their overall marketing mix. Ron will also support clients and agencies in their performance marketing planning and budgeting efforts, and will help them develop and maximize the efficiency of their performance marketing infrastructure.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:05 PM | Permalink

September 12, 2005

New Katrina Missing Persons Meta Search Site & Spidering Issues With Red Cross Site

Katrina Search is another new service designed to let you meta search from a variety of web sites that have information about people missing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Search Katrina Missing Persons Sites from Lycos and Katrina: Search for Missing People from Yahoo are two others we mentioned going up last week.

Meanwhile, Sites not yet in sync on searches looks at how Yahoo cofounder David Filo got personally involved to create the Yahoo service. It also illustrates how what sounds to me to be dynamic URLs from a Microsoft server platform meant a new site from the Red Cross became unspiderable by Yahoo and other services.

That's apparently been fixed or will be shortly. The story calls the site "Family First" but I believe it is actually this one: Family Links Registry.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:23 AM | Permalink

September 7, 2005

Google Guys Are Top Powerbrokers

As Google celebrates its seventh birthday the NY Daily News reports that the "Google Guys" (Sergey Brin and Larry Page) have debuted on Vanity Fair's annual list of business "powerbrokers" at number one. Dropping to second place in the rankings is Wal-Mart (a company that Google has been compared with) CEO, H. Lee Scott.

Yahoo's CEO, Terry Semel, made the list. Others powerbrokers include Rupert Murdoch, Sumner Redstone, and Larry Ellison. More in the article: Google duo tops power list.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:48 AM | Permalink

Google Loses Another Employee To Odeo; Yahoo Gains Nokia Guru

Some employee shifting news, this time someone from Google's Blogger service jumping over to Odeo plus Yahoo gaining a noted Nokia employee.

Dirson notes that Biz Stone from Google's Blogger has jumped ship to the Odeo podcasting service (which I find pretty cool and hope to do a longer review shortly). Evan Williams, cofounder of Blogger, started Odeo after leaving Google last October. Stone explains his reasoning here, saying:

Blogger is hitting a high note right now in more than one aspect with lots of cool stuff to work on over the next year. It's been awesome here at Google and I'm going to miss working with such a great group of people....

Odeo was officially founded in December of last year and recently announced funding. There's already an awesome group crowded into that little San Francisco office and I figured if I wanted to play, then now is the time. So I looked into it and Williams told me I have a face for Odeo. Well, not in so many words but you understand. There's lots of potential here and I'm excited about doing my part to help see it through. I'll miss working with my Google friends but I look forward to shaking things up and, er, making some noise at Odeo.

Meanwhile, Russell Beattie notes that Yahoo has gained Christian Lindholm, who he says is the "father" of the Nokia Series 60 an Navi-key UI. He'll be VP of global mobile products. Lindholm shares more on his blog here, including his three reasons for going to Yahoo:

A perfect blend of content and communication
Yahoo being well positioned for expected growth in the next generation of the web
Yahoo really wants to "crack" the mobile internet nut

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:46 AM | Permalink

August 4, 2005

Better Search Means Helping People Get Things Done

The ZDNet article: Yahoo's new search master, offers a profile of and comments from Prabhakar Raghavan, a legend in the world of online info retrieval and the just hired person in charge of Yahoo Research Labs.

From the article: Regarding search, Raghavan said, "We have two views of better search. Most people are not interested in search?they want to get things done. The future has to be more friendly to people getting tasks done. You don?t want to spend two weeks of evenings sitting at a keyboard and piecing together a vacation plan. You want a system to go out and find the answers, based on future technology that goes beyond crawling and indexing page. That future technology, according to Raghavan, is diving into the ?deep Web? and semi-structured queries. "I hesitate to use the buzzword of 'Semantic Web'?but it is about entity extraction, XML queries, unstructured queries, semantic ambiguity. We have to build a view of the world. When you issue a query, it has richer view than a text index. We?ll start to see manifestations of this in five years."

I've thought for several years that search engines will increasingly become personalized answer engines for certain types of information needs. If I read Dr. Raghavan's comments correctly, that's also where he sees it going.

See Also: + Hypersearching the Web One of my all-time favorite papers about web searching by Raghavan and the other members of IBM's Clever Project.

+ The KnowItAll Project at the University of Washington Autonomously extracting "facts" from web documents. A project you might want to know about.

+ A June 2004 Searchday Interview with Dr. Gary Flake Flake is the former head of Yahoo Research Labs. Flake left Yahoo earlier this year and is now at Microsoft. Flakes shares some insights about the future of search.

Posted by Gary Price at 7:21 PM | Permalink

August 1, 2005

Listen Live: Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's SVP of Search, Speaks!

While many of us are at SES next Monday (August 8, 2005), Jeff Weiner will be talking Yahoo Search at the Pacific Crest Technology Forum. Jeff's presentation will be webcast live beginning at 1pm EDST/10am PDST via a link on the Yahoo Investors Relations page. Safe travels Jeff. I hope you're back in time to say hello at SES (yes, I'll even be there).

Posted by Gary Price at 6:55 PM | Permalink

July 28, 2005

Microsoft Gets Temporary Restraining Order in Google Case

A Washington State Superior Court judge issued a temporary restraining order today barring Dr. Kai-Fu Lee from performing his duties as the recently appointed head of Google China.

According to the AP,

Superior Court Judge Steven Gonzalez granted a temporary restraining order barring Kai-Fu Lee from working at Google on any product, service or project similar to those he worked on at Microsoft, including Internet and desktop search technology. In a statement e-mailed after the ruling, Google lawyer Nicole Wong called the judge's decision "only a temporary measure to maintain the status quo and to give the court more time to fully consider the parties' positions. "We are confident that once the judge has done so he will side with Google and Dr. Lee. Microsoft will not prevail in their intimidation campaign."

No word on the Google's countersuit in a California court.

A full text copy of the temporary restraining order is available here.

More in this News.com report and this blog post from yesterday.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:47 PM | Permalink

And More On Search Hiring!

At the end of my post about Yahoo raiding IBM for employees, I originally concluded, "Where have all the engineers gone? Off to Google, Yahoo and MSN." Sounds better if you hum the tune of "Where Have All The Flowers Gone." Thought it was a bit lame so cut it -- then just came across Anyway, Revenge of the Nerds -- Again from BusinessWeek, where Ben Elgin looks at the brain drain happening as Google and Yahoo suck up tech talent. Geez, 230 engineers hired by Google in the second quarter of this year! A nice recap of who's gone where.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:06 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Hiring From IBM

We don't need no stinkin' Microsoft execs like Google, says Yahoo. We'll rob IBM! Yahoo Is Wooing I.B.M. Technical Talent from the New York Times looks at how Yahoo just picked up Prabhakar Raghavan, formerly of the much cited Clever project (and part of the foundation for Teoma), as head of research. He's not directly from IBM but comes to Yahoo via Verity. But another direct IBM hire has happened and Yahoo says more are in the works. This follows on Yahoo recently opening a new research lab at UC Berkeley, though they did lose their former Yahoo Labs head to Microsoft in April. Google, meanwhile, prefers to raid Bell Labs. See From Bell Labs To Google Labs for that.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:30 AM | Permalink

July 19, 2005

Microsoft Sues Google Over China Hire

It's time to take the Google vs. Microsoft rivalry to court.

In my post earlier today about Google expanding their presence in China by opening a research lab, I noted that Google had hired Dr. Kai-Fu Lee away from Microsoft where he was serving as a corporate vice president.

Well, it didn't take long for the folks in Redmond to sue Dr. Lee claiming he's breaching the Microsoft employee confidentiality and non-compete agreements by joining Google.

From a ZDNet article:

Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said in an e-mail. "We are asking the court to require Dr. Lee and Google to honor the confidentiality and non-competition agreements he signed when he began working for Microsoft."

In an email to SEW, Google's David Krane tells us: "We have reviewed Microsoft's claims and they are completely without merit. Google is focused on building the best place in the world for great innovators to work. We're thrilled to have Dr. Lee on board at Google. We will defend vigorously against these meritless claims and will fully support Dr. Lee."

Postscript: Dirson points to comments about the lawsuit from an ex-Microsoftie now working at Google.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:13 PM | Permalink

July 7, 2005

China News For Google, Baidu & Yahoo

Lots of news in terms of China and search, ranging from Google perhaps eyeing Baidu, Baidu saying it's happy staying independent and Yahoo China losing its president.

Google facing search engine China quandary from the San Jose Mercury News looks anew at reasons why Google might be interested in owning more of the homegrown and apparently popular Baidu search engine. Google has a 4 percent share now. Gaining more might give Google access to Baidu advertisers, or perhaps more distribution for its own existing ads or perhaps give it a way to reach more of China without having to impose censorship on its own web search results at Google.

Meanwhile, Baidu makes first response to Google purchase rumor from the People's Online Daily has Baidu saying that it "belives independent development is its best way out."

Yahoo China President offers sudden resignation, also from the People's Online Daily, covers the departure of Yahoo China's president.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:48 AM | Permalink

June 24, 2005

WebmasterWorld Search & Marketing Conference Recap: Day 3

The third and last day of the WebmasterWorld Search & Marketing Conference 2005 in New Orleans happened yesterday. Below is the roundup of live coverage from Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable and Aaron Wall from SEO Book relating to search:

Morning Coffee with Yahoo's Tim Mayer: Covers mainly Q&A with Tim, who's well known to many search marketers for having dealt with webmaster issues in his time with Yahoo...and FAST...and Inktomi. Some tips on getting reincluded and other related topics. 45 Minutes with Yahoo's Tim Mayer is coverage from SEO Book.
Linking on a Dime: Tips on how to value the quality of a link and gaining links in general. Linking on a Dime is the SEO Book recap.
Super Session: Search Engines and Webmasters: Q&A with search engines on indexing and ranking issues. WMW Search Engines and Webmasters is SEO Book's take on the session.
Link Building Campaigns WMW Conference: From SEO Book, covers briefly basic tips on link building.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:03 AM | Permalink

June 12, 2005

What About a Yahoo Web Browser?; Meet the Chief "People" Yahoo

Two brief items from the Yahoo beat.

1) On Friday, Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, said in an interview that a Yahoo Browser might "make sense" in the future.

You could look to Yahoo to do most everything that makes sense on the Internet going forward,? Semel said. Developing a browser might make sense ?at some point in time,? he said.

Semel also believes that that advertising and subscription services are still in their infancy. More in the Bloomberg article: Hit parade might grow if Yahoo adds browser.

2) You're likely aware of the fact that Jerry Yang's title is "Chief Yahoo." However, did you know that Yahoo also has a "Chief People Yahoo?" Today's San Jose Mercury News has a package of articles, interviews, and audio with this person. Her name is Libby Sartain and her official title is, senior vice president of human resources at Yahoo but she prefers the title of "Chief People Yahoo."

Postscript: The Yahoo Browser Exists from Jeremy Zawodny notes there is an actual Yahoo browser already. So either Semel was unaware of it or he understood that perhaps a more standalone, non-cobranded offering may have been what the reporter was asking about.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:07 PM | Permalink

May 10, 2005

Software Design Legend and Guru Heads to Yahoo

According to this report from Reuters, legendary software design guru, Larry Tesler, is leaving Amazon.com for a job at Yahoo where he will serve vice president of Yahoo's User Experience and Design Group. He will also be a Research Fellow for Human-Computer Interaction within Yahoo Research Labs.

Tesler has one impressive (understatement) resume. He worked at Amazon from 2001 until about a month ago. At Amazon, he was vice president in charge of improving the online shoppipng experience for consumers. Tesler worked at IBM's PARC Research Lab (1973-1980) as well as Apple during the early days of the Mac (1980-1997).

This news release from Yahoo has more about Tesler's background.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:00 PM | Permalink

May 5, 2005

Yahoo Hires Cnet's Editor-in-Chief, Plans to Expand Technology Content

The Wall St. Journal is reporting (this link should work, otherwise WSJ subscribers only) that Yahoo has hired veteran journalist Patrick Houston away from Cnet where he served as Editor-in-Chief. His new title at Yahoo is general manager for technology.

...Yahoo expects to expand on its "hybrid" model of licensing content from other news providers [about 100] and featuring exclusive Yahoo content.

Yahoo News also offers a searchable database of more that 7,000 open web news sources.

Houston's hiring is yet another sign that Yahoo plans to develop more original material for various parts of their service. In November 2004, the company hired Neil Budde, a founding editor of The Wall Street Journal online, as Executive Producer of Yahoo News.

Late last week, Yahoo officially launched a new version of the Yahoo News site.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:36 AM | Permalink

May 3, 2005

Yahoo Plans to Increase Number of Engineers at Software Subsidiary in India

Computerworld Singapore reports that Yahoo is planning to add 200 new product engineers and support staff at its subsidiary, Yahoo Software Development India, located in Bangalore.

Yahoo Software Development India Pvt Ltd, a subsidiary of Yahoo Inc. created two years ago, currently employs over 300 engineers, Venkat Panchapakesan, the subsidiary's chief executive officer, said on Saturday. The new staff will be added by the end of 2006, he added. The Indian subsidiary is the only Yahoo operation outside of its Sunnyvale, California, headquarters that does product engineering, Panchapakesan said. Yahoo's blogging software was built in India and first deployed in Korea in 2003, he said. The blogs platform is now part of Yahoo 360, a social networking and blogging service that went into beta testing in March.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:38 PM | Permalink

May 2, 2005

Yahoo Plans Customer Service Center in Oregon

News from Oregon that Yahoo is planning to open a customer service center in the Portland suburb of Hillsboro. The story says that the center will employ about 170 people.

Last week, we blogged about Google's plan to open a tech center in The Dalles, Oregon.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:47 PM | Permalink

April 27, 2005

Google Interviews, Yahoo and Blinkx Hire

Three search engine personnel stories in the news today. Here's a roundup.

+ Stefanie Olsen reports that Google is interviewing a former U.S. State Department employee, Dan Senor, to head Google's marketing team. Recently you might have seen Senor on TV at press conferences while he served as Advisor to the U.S. Presidential Envoy in Iraq. Senor is interviewing for the position that Cindy McCaffery left last year. Google isn't commenting.

+ Yahoo has hired Shawn Hardin as vice-president of content development. Hardin comes to Yahoo from AOL where he was senior vp of broadband. Before that he worked at several studios and was the head of NBC Internet. He'll be based at the Yahoo Media Division hq in Santa Monica, California.

+ Blinkx, the provider of both contextual search and video search technology, has hired Jonathan Gregg as Vice President, Business Development for the U.S. Gregg comes from Yahoo where he served as Manager of Global Alliances.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:17 AM | Permalink

April 13, 2005

Jobs at Google and Yahoo

I'm always reviewing job openings in the web search biz. They can be a great way to see where a company might be headed or just where they need some help.

Here's just a small sampling (and I mean small) of postings that I've come across in the past week from Google and Yahoo.

Google

+ Do You Speak English, French or German? Google is looking for temporary help (remote workers) rating the quality of ads.

+ Marketing: Creative Director

+ AdSense: Upsell Coordinator

+ AdWords: AdWords Rep

+ Sell Google Advertising in NYC

+ Technical Writer: Write About Google Products and Services Jobs in Operations and Software Engineering.

Yahoo

+ Engineering: Help Yahoo Develop a New Front-End for Yahoo Photos

+ Technical Writer: Write About Overture (Yahoo Search Marketing Services) Products

+ Product Manager at Yahoo Small Business

Posted by Gary Price at 11:21 AM | Permalink

April 12, 2005

Yahoo Names New Head of Yahoo Research Labs

Just a couple of hours after Danny blogged about Dr. Gary Flake from the Yahoo Research Lab heading to Microsoft, we here that Yahoo has already named a new person in charge of the lab.

Dr. Usama Fayyad, Yahoo's Chief Data Officer, will also now be in charge of the YRL. In December, we posted about Dr. Fayyad coming to Yahoo as the company's first Chief Data Officer.

This news release contains more about Dr. Fayyad and also discusses how Yahoo plans to expand the scope of the work being done at YRL.

Dr. Fayyad's home page (from his days at the Jet Propulsion Lab, pre 1996) is still online and lists some of his publications to that point. After leaving JPL, Fayyad moved to Microsoft Research. Here's a copy (via the Internet Archive) of his home page from 1998. Finally, links to many papers from his days at Microsoft Research can be accessed here.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:10 PM | Permalink

MSN Steals Head Of Yahoo Labs MSN tells us it has just hired Dr. Gary Flake as a distinguished engineer, the first such external hire for a distinguished engineer for the company. Formerly, Flake was head of Yahoo Labs. He joined Overture back in 2003 and later became part of Yahoo through its purchase of Overture. Our Gary -- Gary Price -- did a three part interview with Flake last year. You can find all parts referenced from the top of the last one: Behind the Scenes at Yahoo Labs, Part 3

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:52 AM | Permalink

April 4, 2005

More On Yahoo's Media Group & Yahoo Wins MSN Content Exec

Yahoo's plans to be a player in providing access to various types of entertainment content is discssed in the AP article: Yahoo raises eyebrows with Hollywood push.

Yahoo says it is in the earliest stages of developing its entertainment strategy and therefore declined to make an executive available to discuss it with The Associated Press. But the company has made it clear that one of [Lloyd] Braun?s [Head of Yahoo Media Group] mandates is to find new ways for Yahoo?s music, games, news, sports, kids and other divisions to draw more visitors.

Moving content off the computer onto cell phones, portable media players and other devices is likely a key goal, many in the industry believe.

On a related note, ClickZ reports in Yahoo! Poaches MSN Content Exec that Scott Moore is leaving his post as MSN's general manager of programming to become the VP of content operations with Yahoo's Media Group.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:41 PM | Permalink

February 15, 2005

Yahoo! Goes to Ireland

Yahoo! is announcing an expansion of their European operations by adding more than 400 new jobs in Dublin, Ireland. According to the article the jobs will involve financial, web hosting and customer support. More in the RTE story: Yahoo HQ to create 400 Dublin jobs. Google opened their European HQ in Dublin in October 2004.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:44 AM | Permalink

February 9, 2005

Latest Jobs At Yahoo

It's always interesting to review what positions the various search companies are looking to fill. In the past week, I've noticed many new openings posted on the Yahoo! Careers web site. Here's a sample:

+ Product Manager 1 "...will be responsible for developing and executing a strategy for leading self-publishing and self-expression services, focusing primarily on Blogs." + Data Architect "...experienced database engineer to join the Yahoo! Product Optimization Platform group." + Product Manager 1 "...help manage the Front Page of Yahoo!" + Director Product Mgmt 2, Yahoo! Search Technology "...drive new search technology projects and innovation within the search team."

Danny also just blogged about a SEM Manager job opening at Yahoo.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:05 AM | Permalink

December 21, 2004

New Accounting Officer at Yahoo

For those of you who closely monitor the management at the major search companies, some news from Yahoo today via an SEC filing. On December 16th, the Yahoo Board of Directors named Michael Murray, Senior Vice President of Finance, the principal accounting officer of the Company. Dow Jones also has a story about Murray's appointment.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:22 PM | Permalink

December 13, 2004

Yahoo Names Its First Chief Data Officer

Yahoo has named Dr. Usama Fayyad as Chief Data Officer and senior vice president of the Strategic Data Solutions group.

Fayyad will be responsible for Yahoo!'s overall data strategy, architecting Yahoo!'s data policies and systems, prioritizing data investments, and managing the Company's data processing infrastructure and analysis.

You can read about Dr. Fayyad background (including a five year stint as head of the Microsoft Research data mining group) in this news release.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:50 PM | Permalink

November 22, 2004

No Thanks Google, Hello Yahoo, Says Consultant

Earlier this month, Russell Beattie sent a public no thank you note to Google over a job interview. Now he's signing on as a consultant for mobile technology at Yahoo: Starting on Monday I'm Working at Yahoo!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:10 AM | Permalink

September 18, 2004

Yahoo's Semel Contender for Disney CEO Job

Yahoo's Semel emerging as contender for Disney CEO Source: San Jose Mercury

Dawn C. Chmielewski and Michael Bazeley report in The Merc that Yahoo CEO Terry Semel has emerged as a possibility to take over the top spot at Disney when Michael Einser steps down in 2006.

>From the article, "Semel's name surfaced almost immediately after Disney's embattled CEO, Michael Eisner, announced last week that he would leave in 2006, when his contract expires. It is the kind of opportunity Semel would relish, according to Hollywood executives who know him."

Posted by Gary Price at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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