February 12, 2007

Yahoo Builds "Brickhouse"

I missed this on Friday, but this Business Week story on Yahoo's internal program to get more agile is definitely worth a look. It's called "Brickhouse" (cue the funky bass line from the Commodores song). Last week's release of Pipes represents the first fruits of the program.

Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake has been chosen to lead a team of Yahoos in their own offices in San Francisco to develop new projects and experiment within their day-to-day jobs. Many of the products that come out of Brickhouse may not carry the Yahoo brand, to allow the company to experiment a bit with edgier ideas, according to Bradley Horowitz, vice-president of Yahoo's advanced development division.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:20 AM | Permalink

September 27, 2006

What's Cooking in Search Engine Labs

Many of the major search engines showcase the projects they are working on in their respective research labs. Want a peek behind the scenes? Read on in today's SearchDay article, Behind the Scenes in the Search Engine Labs.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 2:25 AM | Permalink

June 12, 2006

Trovetopia - Yahoo Shopping Test Bed Site

Gary Price at ResourceShelf noticed that Yahoo registered two trademarks: "Trovetopia" and "THE N9NE," with Trovetopia also being the name of an active Yahoo shopping site.

I'm not sure about THE N9NE, but according to Chris Saito [thanks for the quick response!] Trovetopia turns out to be a "test bed for [Yahoo!] APIs its built entirely using the web services available on the Yahoo! Developer Network.

It's cool to see Yahoo playing around with its own APIs. Yahoo Tech is another place to see the power of the APIs. Considering that I get an email each week about people interested in using a shopping comparison engine API, it's smart to put these services on display.

Posted by Brian Smith at 9:48 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

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

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

July 28, 2005

Yahoo Research Labs Releases Redesigned Site

It's quite the busy day at the Yahoo Research Labs (YRL). First, news that Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan is joining Yahoo to run the YRL. Second, a redesigned version of the YRL web site is now online.

Perhaps the best place to begin is the research overview section where you'll find brief overviews of YRL work in:

The site continues to offer a "webliography" of papers by members of the lab. Two papers just posted (abstracts only) that might be of interest are:

Variable latent semantic indexing
Unweaving a web of documents

Links are also made available where you can request a copy of these and other papers from the author(s).

Finally, the YRL site still offers to access bios (now with pictures) of each member of the YRL staff.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:47 PM | 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 15, 2005

Yahoo Announces New Research Laboratory

According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle and this news release, Yahoo is opening a new research laboratory in a partnership with the University of California, Berkeley.

Nobody has a monopoly on good ideas," said Usama Fayyad, senior vice president and chief data officer at Yahoo. "There are so many challenges technically that we can use all the brain power we can."

According to the Yahoo Research Labs-Berkeley site the lab will, "...explore and invent social media and mobile media technology and applications that will enable people to create, describe, find, share, and remix media on the web."

Yahoo Mindset, and Yahoo SmartSort are two publilcy accesible demo projects being developed by members of the YRL.

Yahoo also operates research labs in Sunnyvale and Pasadena.

Postscript: More about Yahoo Research Labs-Berkeley and its director Marc Davis, in a post by Bradley Horowitz on the Yahoo Search Blog.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:29 PM | Permalink

June 30, 2005

Behind the Scenes at the Major Engines

All of the major search engines, to one degree or another, provide insights into what they're working on in their research and development labs. The quality and quantity of what's shared varies widely, but you can get a good sense of what to expect in the future by spending some time with what's available. Today's SearchDay article, What's Cooking in Search Engine Labs shows you where to find the best sources of inside information, both official and unofficial.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:28 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

October 13, 2004

A Yahoo Research Labs Workshop

Those of you interested in personalization issues might want to take a look at a couple of interesting presentations (PowerPoint slides) from a Yahoo Research Labs workshop on recommender systems that was held in August

A recommender system is an automated algorithm for providing personalized recommendations (for movies, or music, or restaurants, for example) to a user, often by looking for relationships between that user and a large base of other users. In a sense, a recommender system automates the social process of obtaining referrals or recommendations from like-minded friends.

The presentations were given by: + Professor John Riedl, University of Minnesota "Recommender Systems: Evolution of Collaborative Filtering Recommender Interfaces"

Note: Dr. Riedl is a member of the Group Lens project. One of their projects, MovieLens, offers free access to a movie recommendation service.

and

+ Jon Herlocker, Oregon State University Collaborative Filtering: Some Comments on the State of the Art

Posted by Gary Price at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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