June 6, 2006

Facelift, New Features For Yahoo's MyWeb Bookmark Service

Yahoo's MyWeb bookmark service has gotten a facelift and new features to make it easier than before for people to find what others are saving and sharing on the service. Yahoo MyWeb Gets New Look, Easier Browsing & Viewing Features in today's SearchDay from me covers the changes and revisits how the system works in general.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:04 AM | Permalink

May 17, 2006

Jeff Weiner Talking At Yahoo Analyst Day

I'm at Yahoo's Analyst Day today, and I thought I'd give a shot at live blogging a session or two. We'll see how it goes, starting with Jeff Weiner, senior vice president, search and marketplace, at Yahoo. He's doing the first session focused exclusively on search, though Lloyd Braun, speaking now, has touched on a few things -- including the new Yahoo Finance charts to come, which look to bring Yahoo up to what Google rolled out with Google Finance.

Slide on web search market size, basically says lots of people search, 1 billion queries estimated worldwide per day, Asia largest growing market, $15 billion estimated in paid search this year, so Yahoo cares about search :)

Differentiating now, web search quality, user experience, vertical search, multimedia search -- all stated briefly as things making Yahoo different but mainly a lead in to what he says is the big differentiator, social search.

Now the generations of search. Newsgroups said to be the closest proxy to search in the early 1990. The alpha chip allowed participation to scale from scientists on newsgroups to millions of webmasters and publishers on the web. (hmm, ok, jeff). Then Inktomi and Google go from millions of web sites hand categorized to billions of pages indexed. And now the next jump -- billions of people on the planet with knowledge. How do you get it?

Now a competitive landscape chart, too quickly to record. Here comes FUSE! You know FUSE, Find Use Share & Expand vision that Yahoo's pitched the past year. Share is at the heart of what they want to do, seeing that as a way to grow.

The Social Search Strategy: get a critical mass of high-quality content (and sadly with My Web, so far they haven't done that, but it might still come. Delicious, Flickr are already successful in their own ways. Also to leverage meta data. "Better search through people" is another motto put out there.

Knowledge Search -- hey, it's Yahoo Answers, with now having 10 million answers maybe is a critical mass success. Here's a personal anecdote from him on using it. Esther Dyson says something about The Queen (ruler of my wife's country) talking about the world smelling like fresh paint. What the hell does that mean? He goes to Yahoo Answers to get an answer (why do I think I could find it in regular web search in only a few minutes -- I'll try later).

Hey! Hey, hey, hey -- OK, now Yahoo has picked up the queen thinks the world smells like fresh paint from Yahoo Answers and puts it at the top of Yahoo regular/web search.

Much of the world has it now, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Latin America to get it soon.

Moving on to Yahoo Groups, which has a Yahoo Answers module in it now. Here come numbers. Yahoo Groups has 6 million groups, 90 million members participating. "That's a lot of knowledge. That's a lot of untapped knowledge." Especially people who might not have the tech savvy to publish in other ways. Sure -- but come, it hasn't been that hard to do web pages or dare I saw blogs.

Now social bookmarking, good it's said to get opinions and trusted sources rather than factual stuff web search is said to be good at. Jaguar typed into Yahoo, first thing in your mind? Car -- "yeah, for this audience it is," he says. Oh, here it comes -- multiple meanings of Jaguar. I've got stuff MSN talked about years ago showing how there are different meanings (and they had a good system to give you different options). On delicious, most searches for jaguar bring up the operating system. He calls this flavoring. What happens if you take these flavors search experiences from Groups and put it into Yahoo search. "Powerful stuff." Yep, if they do it.

Social media -- it's Flickr time as the eyes of the world. Flickr is changing our society right before our eyes. Wow -- but I supposed so. Goodness knows it's even got me using it :)

Now marry the eyes of the world with the world's most popular home page -- that's Flickr on Yahoo, plus Flickr being on the Nokia N-Series multimedia computers (you know, their smartphones).

Yahoo Video search is coming and will allow sharing. Yeah, so take that YouTube, Google Video. Well, we'll see. Flickr should give them some help here, though.

Monetization! Sponsored listings, graphical media, sponsorships, subscriptions, marketplaces for people to sell -- some of these will come to various new search properties.

Accomplishments. Yahoo Answers out of beta and going general and the 10 million answers I said earlier and a warning that don't expect that number to necessarily be updated going forward. Up from 1 million users in Jan to 7 million know.

Taiwan, got Yahoo Knowledge and grew share in 2004 through 2005.

My Web is mentioned, a redesign is coming in the next few weeks.

Flickr, with the founders on the cover of Newsweek and them making the Time 100 most influential people list (hey, congrats!). 260 million photo tags out there, so don't think these are niche properties. "These properties are changing the world."

Social search is equal to 30 percent of overall web search.

It was never about man versus machine. It was about man with machine -- and that fuels FUSE vision, which is how Yahoo believes it will once again change the game.

Questions (to panel of all speakers from the morning, answers from Jeff unless I note otherwise)

What incentives rolling out to help with participation? Personal, social and economic he says. Personal utility for individuals, get an answer, you want to use it again. Social -- helping people plus getting some ego boost. It's amazing how that's been driving things, he says. It is very much part of what's made Flickr and other properties successful. Economic lightly touched on content match but think he may have meant YPN. It is not as simple as making economic systems he stresses, especially if a system is built on generosity.

How about reputation and trust in social search. The reputation system will be at the heart of ensuring quality. Yahoo Answers is about to get that in a few weeks, so you can see how reputable others are.

What's the deal with query share loss in the use but gaining monetization nonetheless? I don't think there's any one factor, many different dimensions, he thinks social search are making a diffference, getting new customers and much more integration is to come.

It's Safa Rashtchy from Piper Jaffray -- he typed the queen query into Google and got the page from Yahoo. Jeff -- they've been always after high quality, he jokes. Safa - you're happy helping Google with quality. Jeff -- it drives traffic to us. Yes, absolutely. I'm sure Yahoo's thrilled to have their pages everywhere. Safa, how come sharing and answers didn't take off before until Wikipedia. Jeff -- search is far more part of our lives, as is the way we share with others, sharing "has only started to grow." Knowledge search in Korea took off because knowledge corpus there was much smaller. In the US, felt it was already so large, what difference would it make. Then chief engineer played with tools in Taiwan, said this isn't about search, this is about community and sharing -- and that's powerful.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:09 PM | Permalink

April 5, 2006

Yahoo Enhances My Web with "People Centric" Tools

Yahoo's My Web offers both personal and social search features, but until now you've had to go through Yahoo 360 to invite others to share information. Later tonight, Yahoo will be dropping that requirement, allowing you to add anyone as a contact if they have saved public information in their My Web accounts.

"This is a launch to simplify the addition of contacts," said Tim Mayer, Director of Product Management Yahoo! Search. "It's about lowering the barriers to entry to mainstream users so they can experience social search."

The idea is to allow people to quickly build up contacts that have saved and tagged useful information without having to make explicit, personal contact with them.

Yahoo will also be introducing a new feature called "contact labels" that allow you to create small groups and only share material with people within those groups—for example, friends, family, co-workers and so on. The feature is similar to one offered in Yahoo's photo-sharing service, Flickr. Labeling your contacts in theory increases the amount of control you have over what is shared with whom.

Yahoo has begun the process of rolling out the changes to My Web 2.0, and the new features should be fully enabled by midnight pacific time tonight.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 11:00 PM | Permalink

April 4, 2006

Yahoo My Web 2.0 Enhancements Coming Wednesday Night

The Yahoo My Web blog warns us of an upgrade to Yahoo My Web. The upgrade is to take place tomorrow, Wednesday, at 8 pm PDT. During that time, the services will be offline for the time it takes to upgrade, but they do promise us to "introduce some exciting new features." I am pretty interested in seeing what Yahoo is going to be adding.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:21 AM | Permalink

March 22, 2006

A Deeper Look At Personalized News Search Engines

Mark Glaser at MediaShift wrote a great review named Your Guide to Personalized News Sites. He reviews the history of personalized news sites, and discusses many of the new free options people have to search news with a personal touch. Here is a listing of some of the engines he reviewed;

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:31 AM | Permalink

March 21, 2006

Yahoo Removed Block Result Feature From My Web

A reader has informed me that Yahoo has removed the block result (page and site) feature from My Web. The FAQs still says that the feature is available, it reads (for documentation purposes);

Can I block a site from ever showing in my search results?

Yes. Use the Block link in any search result to block that site from showing in search results for all subsequent searches.

To review and edit your list of blocked sites, click the Show blocked link under the results set or the Blocked link under Go To in the My Web management Pages or Tags tabs.

But if you go to Yahoo and search with My Web on any term, you will currently notice that the only options you have under each result are, "More from this site" and "Save." The "Block" link has been removed.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:13 AM | Permalink

February 10, 2006

Yahoo Adds Features to My Web 2.0

Yahoo has enhanced My Web with a number of new features including easier access to your saved searches from the My Web 2.0 homepage, the ability to search everyones tags and share them with the world, a My Web To Go button for bloggers and the ability to edit 20 saved pages at once. More information in this Yahoo Search Blog post.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 1:36 PM | Permalink

November 21, 2005

Add To Google & Save To Yahoo My Web Buttons Out

Nick at Threadwatch discovers a new Add To Google button, while I'm also overdue to discuss the new Save To My Web button that Yahoo kindly rolled out last month. Let's jump in!

The new Add To Google button is easy to implement. Fill out the form at Google, then you get the appropriate HTML. Insert the button on your home page, then when people click, they are directed to add your feed to either their personalized edition of the Google homepage or Google Reader. Adding it to Google Sidebar, sadly, isn't a third option. That should be supported as well. Hopefully, we'll see it come.

As for the new Yahoo button, Yahoo announced it at the end of last month. In fact, I'd been asking them for one publicly, so they came back in that post and specifically called me out to say "Here it is!" But I was on vacation at the time, hence me playing catch-up!

It's very welcomed. My Web is the future of where search is heading at Yahoo, as A Search Marketer's Look At Yahoo My Web 2.0 covers in more depth. Getting your pages added and part of the trust networks that My Webbians are building over there is important. This button makes it easy to encourage that type of saving.

To get the button, there's no form to fill out. You just grab JavaScript code from here. That puts a little button on your site. When people push it, your page title will be grabbed, along with the URL and some suggested tags for saving the page under.

Nick at Threadwatch has gone a step further. He's used the code to make a link-text only version of the save to my web feature. He discusses it more here, and the code is here.

Why not just use the button? By using Nick's code, you can custom the text of the link, in case you want to give people more instructions. For example, look over in our left-hand navigation area. I've used both the button plus Nick's code underneath, altering it to stress that this is "Yahoo" My Web, something the button doesn't say.

Down the line, I want to move that type of code over to the bottom of posts, to help encourage people to save them. Having that as a textual link makes it a bit easier. And if you're going to do it for My Web, why not for bookmarking service Del.icio.us? That's easily done through this code spotted via Threadwatch.

Are all these buttons worthwhile? I still can't tell if they are driving that many sign-ups, but I've fallen into the "learn to love them" category. While having one unified sign-up system might be better, if having an Add To Google or Add To Yahoo button means I'm going to get some additional visitors who recognize what that means, I'm going for it.

Want to love buttons yourself? See Getting Add To & Subscribe Buttons For Feeds, which I've posted for Search Engine Watch members. It takes you to the forms for popular services, so that you can merrily make your own badges.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:34 AM | Permalink

November 17, 2005

Yahoo and MSN: New Patent Apps Published

Patent applications from Yahoo and MSN dealing with user annotations, trust networks, and domain specific database creation and searching were published today by the USPTO. Two of Yahoo's applications fit very nicely with their FUSE (Find, Use, Share, Expand) and MyWeb visions. Links and abstracts follow.

From Yahoo + Title: Search systems and methods with integration of aggregate user annotations Abstract: Computer systems and methods allow users to annotate content items found in a corpus such as the World Wide Web. Annotations, which can include any descriptive and/or evaluative metadata related to a document, are collected from a user and stored in association with that user. Users are able to annotate and view their annotations for any document they encounter while interacting with the corpus, including hits returned in a search of the corpus. Users are also able to search their annotations or to limit searches to documents they have annotated. Metadata from annotations can also be aggregated across users and aggregated metadata applied in generating search results.

+ Title: Search system and methods with integration of user annotations from a trust network Abstract: Computer systems and methods incorporate user annotations (metadata) regarding various pages or sites, including annotations by a querying user and by members of a trust network defined for the querying user into search and browsing of a corpus such as the World Wide Web. A trust network is defined for each user, and annotations by any member of a first user's trust network are made visible to the first user during search and/or browsing of the corpus. Users can also limit searches to content annotated by members of their trust networks or by members of a community selected by the user.

+ Title: System and method for providing automobile marketing research information Abstract: A system and method for providing customized reports regarding pre-sale auto interest is enclosed herein. The reports are configured to provide pre-sale marketing research information about potential shoppers of particular auto models. The reports are also configured to provide information about competitors' auto models. The reports are also configured to provide demographic and interest information of the potential shoppers of the particular auto models.

From Microsoft: + Title: Method and system for indexing and searching databases Abstract: A search system generates an index for databases by generatively sampling the databases and uses that index to identify and formulate queries for searching the databases. The generated index is referred to as a domain-attribute index and contains a domain-level index and site-level indexes. A site-level index for a database maps site attributes to distinct attribute values within the database. The domain-level index for a domain maps attribute values to database and site attribute pairs that contain those attribute values. To generate a site-level index for a database within a certain domain, the search system starts out with an initial set of the sample data for that domain. The search system generates sampling queries based on the sample data and submits the sampling queries to a database. The search system updates the site-level index based on the sampling results and uses the results to generate more sampling queries.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:23 PM | Permalink

October 28, 2005

New Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 Bookmarklet & Blog Post Link

Kudos to Nick (of Threadwatch fame) on the creation of a Yahoo! MyWeb 2.0 Bookmarklet & Blog Post tool. Nick's even made the source code available. Happy saving and tagging.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:55 PM | Permalink

October 10, 2005

Show Your My Web Saved Pages On Your Site -- But Still No Add To My Web Button!

Oh, such disappointment. Back when Yahoo released My Web 2.0, I wished for an Add To My Web button that could be placed on my pages, to encourage readers to add them to Yahoo's My Web. Catching up on reading today, I saw the My Web Badges, now live! post over at the Yahoo My Web 2.0 blog. Finally, I thought! Nope, I found, when I went over to the My Web Badge creation page. My Web Badges aren't a way to get an Add To My Web button. Instead, they are a way to share the most recent pages saved within My Web.

Specifically:

You can share the most recent pages you saved within My Web
You can share the most recent pages everyone's saved within My Web
You can share the most recent pages you've tagged with particular words
You can share the most recent pages everyone's tagged with particular words

Pick your options, and you get a handy bit of code that will show your saved pages on your site. Oddly, you can't choose to share pages that your community has shared. It's either you or what everyone's saved, rather than that middle choice.

Being able to show picks is nice, but I still want that Add To My Web button. C'mon, Yahoo get with it! If Jeremy can use Greasemonkey to put Add To My Web links on Google, Yahoo ought to be able to give publishers the ability to do the same thing on their own sites.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:46 AM | Permalink

October 9, 2005

Hey Dude, Yahoo Wants You To Dig It, Tag It, and Share It!

The Yahoo team in Sunnyvale has filed for a new trademark/service mark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that hits on tagging and sharing (aka MyWeb 2.0).

What's the phrase Yahoo is registering? + "Dig It. Tag It. Share It." Serial #: 78720852

Kind of reminds me of the line from Fast Times at Ridgemont High -- "Right, learn it, know it, live it."

Might this be a new Yahoo/MyWeb slogan?

I'm guessing (oh no!) that "dig" means to look, search and hopefully find material of value. If not, using the word "dig" just sounds so cool! (-:

Of course, the slogan plays on Yahoo's FUSE philosophy of finding, using, sharing, and expanding knowlege.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:13 PM | Permalink

June 30, 2005

A Search Marketer's Look At Yahoo My Web 2.0

For Search Engine Watch members, I've posted A Search Marketer's Look At Yahoo My Web 2.0, which looks at how search marketers may -- or may not -- have an impact on Yahoo's new My Web 2.0 system that Chris Sherman covered yesterday. Among the topics I address:

The difference between "regular" Yahoo versus Yahoo My Web 1.0 and 2.0 from the perspective of what a searcher sees.
A revisit of how My Web 1.0's block and save links work.
How My Web 2.0 pushes down "regular" results, making it important to understand My Web 2.0 better. A screenshot from the story speaks volumes about this. Regular Yahoo is on the left, and Yahoo for a My Web 2.0 user is on the right:

How My Web 2.0 users are more likely to detour into My Web 2.0 results.
How My Web 2.0 result listings are generated uniquely for each user based on what they and their community saves.
How the MyRank system uses a person's community to rank keyword-driven search results, along with other key factors.
How tagged results are the way to see what "everyone" is interested in and how searchers will probably end up in the most popular tags.
How the tags currently seem extremely vulnerable to tag cloud bombing, with an example of me pushing the two highlighted tags below into the top results with little effort:

How Yahoo might solve the problem, along with how it says more defenses are going into place (see also this article I've posted for everyone today on tagging issues).
An long-term strategy to ensure your fresh content is feeding into tag areas in an appropriate, searcher-friendly manner.
How the tags are effectively about to become the world's largest collection of Free For All link pages but how that might also change.
More tips on how to import and feed content into the system, including the need to use RSS 1.0 rather than RSS 2.0 currently, if you want to import categories to become tags.
The wish for Yahoo to roll out a "Save To My Web" button that you can feature to your visitors similar to the Add To My Yahoo button already offered that site owners can display to visitors and tips on getting saved until that happens.
How to appropriate extend your network or reach others who may want to see your content.
Making use of notes for reputation management
How the trust network will grow to impact ranking of all Yahoo results, not just My Web ones.

Though written for marketers in mind, anyone interested in more about how the My Web 2.0 system works should find the article useful. As said, it's offered to those who support Search Engine Watch by becoming members -- support that's greatly appreciated by your hard working editors over here!

Also posted on the blog are these related articles today:

Plus there's Chris Sherman's overview article from yesterday, Yahoo Integrates Personal & Social Search with My Web 2.0. Want to discuss or comment on any of this? Visit our forum thread, New Yahoo My Web 2.0 & MyRank.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:32 PM | Permalink

Yahoo My Web Tagging & Why (So Far) It Sucks In my Yahoo My Web: An eBay For Knowledge article out today, I cover the promise that Yahoo My Web has for potentially improving search results through trust networks. As for the promise of tagging to improve results, I find myself just as dubious as I've been about tagging.

Where to begin? I could let Gary run lose with a litany of complaints. In fact, he probably will share his own perspectives in the near future. But I'll dive in on the problems as I see them.

Double Duty

Most important, the tags are in the impossible position -- one that even Yahoo admits when I talked with them about this -- of trying to do two things at once that aren't compatible. They are:

Trying to show the freshest content on a topic
Trying to show the best content on a topic

At the moment, neither situation is happening. Freshness is determined by when a document was saved. So if I save the iPod home page under the tag of ipod (link viewable only to My Web 2.0 users), there's nothing "fresh" about it except that I've just added it. The page has been around for ages. The mere act of saving it didn't make it fresh.

In contrast, the new iTunes 4.9 software with support for podcasting is new. If someone adds that, it's a nice way to alert others monitoring this topic to the latest about iPods.

Fresh Versus Best

Tagging at a specialized search engine like Technorati doesn't face the double-duty challenge. Technorati is dealing primarily with feed and blog content. That content by its very nature is fresh in some way. In other words, no one is blogging, "Hey, here's the iPod web site" and feeding it as fresh news via the Technorati ipod tag. People are for the most part -- aside from spammers -- saying something new or offering a fresh opinion about iPods and things related to iPods.

As a result, if you want to tune into the latest stuff about iPods, the relatively specialized and fresh content that Technorati gathers can be found via tags. The new Live 8 area is a good example of this.

In contrast, if you want to find a general good resource about a subject, the tags at Technorati suck. Where's the official Live 8 web site? It's not at the top of the recent blog posts for the Live 8 page. The only reason it's on that tag page at all is because Technorati made a customized, special page for the event. For a regular page, go back to the ipod tag page and try to find the official iPod home page. You won't.

Directories Were For Categorized Best Stuff

Showing a list of the best content on a categorized topic -- as opposed to the freshest content -- is the role traditionally filled by directories such as Yahoo's own Yahoo Directory. Look at the Live 8 category there. It's sparse, surprisingly so (or perhaps not given Yahoo's general abandonment of its directory, but at least it has something at all, unlike the Open Directory). But nonetheless, you have no problem finding the official site and top resources about the event, including Technorati's page!

iPod? When I looked at the Technorati tag page for this, one of the top things listed was someone spamming to sell me sunglasses using a gibberish page which was tagged as being about iPods. Meanwhile, Yahoo's iPod category shows the official site first along with a bunch of resources that look good and are focused broadly about iPods.

Well what about del.icio.us? People are bookmarking general information over there, right, not just fresh stuff! Are they? Whenever I look, it seems like people are busy bookmarking a lot of new stuff.

Looking at the google tag today, I saw bookmarks about the new Google Earth service or the new Google Maps API. How about ipod? Some new stuff, some old stuff -- and the same result you get with Yahoo. Stuff that's "fresh" isn't necessarily so, while the popular view shows me only "recently" popular stuff rather than what I'd call "always popular" such as the iPod home page.

Tagging In The Verticals

How about Yahoo-owned Flickr? Yahoo talked to me this week about how 70 percent of all items on Flickr are tagged, but then it immediately qualified without prompting that because Flickr is a photo service, tagging is much more essential.

Indeed -- if you don't tag a picture, you pretty much have no good way of finding it. Tagging makes much, much sense in a photo space. And I love photo tagging. Check out my Photo Search: Google Picasa 2 Vs. Adobe Photoshop Album 2 article from earlier this year. I tag like a madman with Photoshop Album. I live to tag!

You know what? I'm weird. And people tagging on Flickr? They're weird as well. Weird in a good, organized way. Go talk to people you know who have digital cameras -- not your net happy friends but relatively ordinary people or don't work in some net-related industry. They aren't tagging, not on their computers and not with Flickr. Maybe they will eventually, but it's far more likely it will only happen among the masses in areas where tagging is really useful and essential. For general web search, it's not.

Tagging -- like spontaneity -- has time and a place. For some verticals, as I've written, it may make more sense. That's especially so for relatively little services that aren't going to be spam targets. But tagging web listings in general so far makes me think Yahoo's not going to please anyone.

Stepping Backwards

It gets worse, by the way. Tagging will help you keep all your My Web content you're saving organized, right? But what happens when you've created hundreds of tags for thousands of pages? Are you going to browse pages? Everyone largely abandoned browsing directory categories ages ago because keyword search was like a warp drive to zip you to what you wanted, as I've explained.

If you really do save thousands of pages over time, you're not going to want to rely on tagging to locate things. You'll probably just keyword search. Even more so, that will be essential, as the tags you initially created probably won't hold up as things change over time. Do you retag everything? Chances are, you won't.

Another backwards step example? We've had automated clustering technology for ages that will put content into categories, or tag them, if you prefer that term. Check out Clusty, an example using Vivisimo's long-developed tech.

Yahoo bought two different search engines -- AltaVista and AllTheWeb -- that also had clustering that no longer gets offered. Yahoo's own current technology is even used to create the Yahoo News Tag Soup "tag cloud" that I wrote about last month, tech you can now apply to any site or collection of sites you'd like.

Why not use this tech to organized My Web automatically into tags? At the very lest, it would avoid problems like the "important bookmarks" tag being so large in My Web's current tag cloud, something that annoys Gary to no end.

It might also help with the short term tag cloud bombing problem I'm sure that's going to emerge. Look at this:

That's from the A Search Marketer's Look At Yahoo My Web 2.0 article I just posted. In about 15 minutes of work, I popped up "rio karma" and "mp3 player" into the cloud. They won't last, but neither was I working particularly hard to make it happen. Tag cloud spamming at the moment seems incredibly easy.

Yahoo says it has defenses in place that will stop this, stuff that will ramp up as needed. We'll see. But just having just having to have those defenses at all reeks of another step backwards. Rather than tags solving the search spam problem, an entire new way to eliminate tag spam is going to be developed -- just as search spam has had to endure an arms race of defensive measures.

One more step backwards example. As mentioned, some people are looking to tags to keep up with what's new. There's another way to do this. You create keyword-based news alerts to monitor new stuff.

The problem with the major search engines is that keyword-driven news alerts they offer aren't tapping into blog and feed content. That could be fixed over night. And news alerts help ensure that if you're looking for information on podcasts, you might get it even if someone "tagged" what you wanted in the completely different "podcasting" category.

I still miss Excite's awesome NewsTracker service that we had way back in 1997. But there are plenty of good replacements that will automatically scan for stuff on the news sites, and I covered a few here recently. Hopefully we'll see the majors come up with ways for you to flag keywords you wish to monitor in blog and news content, in the way Technorati's Watchlists work or as PubSub allows, to name only two such services.

Nice To Have, Just Don't Expect Much

It's important to note that the long term plan for Yahoo ISN'T to use tags to refine web results. As my other article out today discusses, Yahoo is depending on trust data to improve results. That will be applied to the keyword data primarily inherent in the pages themselves, as well as link data. Tagging will have a role, but not the dominant one. It certainly won't take over for organizing.

That's one reason my long term view isn't to worry about it. Tags are there for those who want them, which is good -- very good. They will be useful to some people, especially so when limited to particular communities. When Yahoo introduces popularity sorting, general tags viewed by everyone might even get better. But as long as they have to do double-duty, I suspect they still won't fulfill either role particularly well.

In contrast, an alternative would be for Yahoo to experiment with some type of social compilation of its actual directory, similar to what I suggested about an Open Directory alternative last month. Let me tag the "best" stuff on a particular topic separately from something that's just fresh, new, cool but not the best in the long term. It would be interesting to see how those two different lists developed.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:17 AM | Permalink

Yahoo My Web: An eBay For Knowledge

Yesterday, Chris wrote about the new Yahoo My Web social search network. I expect many will be excited over the tagging component, but I remain dubious for many reasons which I cover in another article I posted today. But whether tagging works is beside the main point. What deserves the most attention, the real key development, are the trust networks for knowledge Yahoo hopes to create.

I got a tour of the new system while it was in development, when I was visiting at Yahoo last month. After seeing what was planned, I remarked to Yahoo senior vice president of search Jeff Weiner sitting next to me that they were building "an eBay for knowledge." Jeff was already literally bouncing at times with excitement in showing the new system, and the remark made him smile even more broadly.

He smiled because that's exactly the Yahoo goal. My Web is Yahoo's community rating system for information. Just as you buy things on eBay depending on ratings to know if you'll trust a seller, My Web is what Yahoo hopes will help you choose more wisely the information you receive, whether you actively check reviews, contribute or remain an ordinary searcher who completely ignores the tagging and social search components.

In short, Yahoo's not banking on tagging -- the categorization of material -- as a way to help people find things better. It's banking that the mere act of saving things at all, even without tags, will give them a clue about what are trusted pages across the web. By looking at patterns of saving, Yahoo will have trust networks to tap into.

Searching Everyone's Pages, Trust Networks & Public Experts

Chris's Yahoo Integrates Personal & Social Search with My Web 2.0 article explains how searchers can seek information posted into the My Web system. My new A Search Marketer's Look At Yahoo My Web 2.0 article posted today for Search Engine Watch members drills down in depth about what exactly you can and cannot locate in the system and how various components work.

The big missing component is that there's no way currently to search against the "Everyone's Web" content, pages saved by everyone using the My Web 2.0 system. In other words, despite there being around 20,000 pages now saved by everyone in the community (and growing fast), you can only keyword search against content saved by those specifically within your "community" of contacts.

That's going to change in the future, once Yahoo's ready. Trust networks are the missing piece to make that happen.

"Eventually, we'll have 'search everyone' enabled," said Eckart Walther vice president of product management at Yahoo. "In the future, you will be able to see what others share. You can choose to add others to your trust network."

By adding others, Walther means that you can choose to add other people's choices to your own My Web collection of documents, even if they don't wish to network formally with you. It's an important point, because it leads into the public experts system that Yahoo wants to see evolve in the system.

Right now, the only people impacting what you search for are those who have agreed to be in your community -- your friends and friends of friends. But what if you see that there is someone you really respect on a particular topic participating? Consider:

If Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, is tagging content relating to the web, you might want to have him added as an expert to influence what you see.
Like Oprah Winfrey? Then you might want her to have an influence on your results, if she's tagging and saving pages in all her spare time.
Into business with a rebel attitude? If Virgin's Sir Richard Branson were in the system, he might be attractive as an expert for you to add.
Interested in internet and technology law and like what Lawrence Lessig has to say? Then you'd probably like him to help influence your results.

In the current system -- assuming such celebrities were taking part -- you couldn't tap into them unless you knew them directly or were connected by a friend or friend of a friend.

That will change in the future. Not only will you be able to add anyone to your network, but Yahoo wants to evolve the system to help you better spot and use people they'll consider "public experts" you can tap into. Chances are, they won't be giant celebrities. But there will be a range of people regarded as knowledgeable in their areas that you'll likely be able to trust.

In addition, the company will be able to watch how networks begin to expand and rate content. It expects that there will be all sorts of data that can be mined to help rank results better, for when people are doing searches against "Everyone's Web" saved pages.

"We can figure out what all these people have in their trust network. We expect to have several thousand networks emerge immediately. We can then overlay those," Walther said.

Trust Networks As The New Link Analysis

Trust won't just be used against My Web content. Yahoo is going to use trust networks to refine all of its web search results -- in other words, searches on "regular" Yahoo.

In October, I explained to Search Engine Watch members that My Web data was something Yahoo was "considering" using. It isn't considering any longer. The company says My Web data will definitely be used to refine results for everyone in the future.

Why? Yahoo knows that despite all the saving that will go on, people will never save all the billions of pages on the web that it already indexes. Instead, what Yahoo accumulate a lot of information on what various trust networks within My Web seem to like. That can be applied to improve the rankings of all pages it indexes, not just those within the My Web area.

We've had a generation of search engines that depended on on-the-page factors such as word location and frequency. We've had a current second generation that tapped into link analysis, looking at how people are linking and what they say in links.

Personal search is that third generational jump, and Yahoo's flavor of personal search is a social network one that it hopes will improve relevancy in web wide results in the way that link analysis helped drive back spam and improve relevancy years ago.

"We're creating personal anchor text for pages, but by having a trust network, we can actually pretty much eliminate spamming," Walther said.

Will Trust Get Spammed?

Hmm. Link analysis has degraded over the years as people learned how to manipulate links. Aren't there going to be plenty of spammers and people trying to mislead the trust networks? Aren't there going to be a lot of well-meaning people who will nonetheless save horrible pages that they love for all the wrong reasons and categorize them terribly?

Sure. Yahoo admits all of this readily. But Yahoo is confident that these types of extremes will be lost among the overall quality it expects to dominate.

"Even if some there are some false positives in an extended trust network, the odds are much better that you won't get spammed compared to the wide web," Walther said.

Social Search Faces More Trust Vulnerabilities

The trust idea makes a lot of sense. Having a set of trusted pages that a search engine can depend on is at the core of the TrustRank system described in a paper written by both Google and Yahoo employees. If you know which pages you can trust, then you can boost them plus let them boost other pages by weighting what they link to more heavily. But to know those trusted pages, you ultimately need human beings to give you a collection.

MSN's new Neural Net / RankNet system which emerged this week seems to tap into a small set of humans doing trust training. Trust there is hard to influence -- hard to spam -- given you don't even know who is creating the core trusted documents.

The new Google Personalized Search service taps into trust by just looking at what you personally select in your searching activities. Influencing or all-out spamming trust there is even harder than with MSN, in that every individual is creating their own set of core trusted documents.

Advice to marketers looking to do better in both systems above? Very little. Have good content and hope for the best. Be trustworthy. There aren't entry points for you to directly influence the systems.

Yahoo's new My Web 2.0 system is ambitious. By virtual of being a social search network, it has various places where trust can be influenced or potentially spammed. In fact, I've been shaking my head a bit over all the time it's taken to closely examine the Yahoo system to figure out where and how things might go wrong.

Advice to marketers looking to do better in the Yahoo system? Lots and lots, as A Search Marketer's Look At Yahoo My Web 2.0 covers.

Different Paths, Same Goal -- Better Relevancy Through Personalization

All of search marketing lives with a poor reputation that isn't completely deserved. SEO -- and SEM by extension -- took another slam today from Matthew Haughey of Metafilter, who puts us on par with cockroaches.

But search marketers have long influenced search engines in good ways to help them locate quality pages that might otherwise not get found, as I covered recently in Worthless Shady Criminals: A Defense Of SEO. In fact, search engines themselves refer people to companies that do SEO, and some have even hired firms to help them. It's not something that would happen if influencing results was always bad.

So, too, influencing trust isn't necessarily bad. Yahoo's system is vulnerable in being ambitious, but it's also strong in being able to tap into things the other systems can't.

Google depends solely on what you like, but that means your more hip and knowledgeable friend that you trust in other aspects of your life can't have an impact on you when it comes to search. Moreover, want to enlist a trusted expert in a field, as described above? You need an ambitious system like Yahoo's that allows that.

It's also noteworthy that Google isn't ruling out social search. On Tuesday -- before Yahoo rolled out its new service [which I have no doubt Google knew was coming] -- I asked Marissa Mayer, director of consumer products for Google, if its new personalized service might evolve into a social search model down the line.

Marissa talked about having worked on a web recommendation tool project in her pre-Google days and was pretty positive about the upside to such systems, I felt. But her experience also taught there are a lot of nuances that need to be taken into account, she said.

"I think there's a lot of potential there, but there's a lot of infrastructure that need to get built there and built well," she said.

Yahoo certainly feels it has the infrastructure. Vulnerabilities? Yahoo says it has this covered. Defenses, plans, self-correcting systems are all supposedly ready to go. Yahoo says it's not being naive about the attacks both overt and unexpected that its system will face.

As Chris wrote yesterday, "We'll see." That's not a cynical statement, either. It's just a fact -- we'll see if it works, and I hope it does.

As Chris also wrote, Google and Yahoo are on "very different paths" in tapping into trust for personalization. So's MSN, and we'll no doubt see Ask Jeeves bring trust into its personalized system as well.

Everyone's heading for that same goal, unique results that give you the best relevancy. Whatever path they take, let's hope they all get there.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:13 AM | Permalink

June 28, 2005

Yahoo Blends Personal & Social Search with MyWeb 2.0

Sometimes the best way to get information is to simply ask a friend or other trusted associate. Yahoo is now extending that idea to web search with MyWeb 2.0, which allows users to create their own "personal web" collections, and then allow trusted associates to search within those results. It's an intriguing idea that's moving the concept of mass media toward "my media," according to Yahoo's Eckart Walther who led development of the project. Today's SearchDay article, Yahoo Integrates Personal, Social Search with MyWeb 2.0 has an in-depth review of the new service.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 11:13 PM | Permalink

May 19, 2005

Yahoo Surveying Web Searchers

Michel from El Telendro dropped me a note about a survey that Yahoo is asking random web search users to complete about the My Web beta. People who complete the survey are offered a chance to win $1000 in a monthly Yahoo sweepstakes. Michel grabbed a couple of screenshots and posted them here and here.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:00 PM | Permalink

April 26, 2005

Yahoo Bolsters Personal Search

That didn't take long: Last week, reviewing the new Google My Web Search service, I wrote "don't expect Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN or AOL Search to stand still." Tonight, Yahoo has rolled out a significant enhancement to the My Yahoo personal search features that the company launched last October. New features include search history, the ability to save cached copies of pages, new sharing tools and more. Tomorrow's SearchDay article, Yahoo Launches My Web Personal Search (available to blog readers now), gives a rundown of the new service from Yahoo.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 8:00 PM | Permalink

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