One of Yahoo’s most respected researchers, Raghu Ramakrishnan, who is the author of one of the most famous database textbooks, “Database Management Systems,” has left the Silicon Valley company to join Microsoft. He was also critical to the development of much of Yahoo’s personalization technology.

Sources said the chief scientist for search and cloud platforms at its Yahoo Labs unit will be a fellow on the software giant’s SQL team.

Ramakrishnan, who has been at Yahoo since 2006, is one of many key researchers to depart before what is expected to be a gutting of the company’s research division in upcoming layoffs and other cuts by new CEO Scott Thompson.

None of this exodus of high-level research talent comes as a surprise. Prabhakar Raghavan, the well-respected head of the Yahoo Labs unit and also recently its head of strategy, has recently left the company to take a job at Google.

Ramakrishnan came to Yahoo from a professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. According to his bio from Yahoo, he was the “founder and CTO of QUIQ, a company that pioneered crowd-sourcing, specifically question-answering communities, powering Ask Jeeves’ AnswerPoint as well as customer-support for companies such as Compaq.”

A Yahoo spokesperson declined comment (but, trust me, it is true).

Prabhakar Raghavan, the well-respected head of Yahoo’s Labs unit and also recently its head of strategy, is leaving the company to take a job at Google.

The departure comes ahead of what will be very deep cuts in his division, which is in charge of long-term research at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, said sources, and is spread all over the country. More researchers at Yahoo — which is a very well-respected group — are also expected to go too and will be the subject of fervent recruiting interest by companies such as Google and Facebook.

Yahoo confirmed the move after I made an inquiry about it this morning.

In a statement, the company said:

“Yahoo! thanks Prabhakar Raghavan for his dedication and contributions to Yahoo! for the past 7 years. We wish him well in his next endeavor. Ash Munshi, CTO, will assume leadership for Y! Labs.”

It is unclear what Raghavan’s new role at Google is.

But, as head of Yahoo Labs, Raghavan’s research arena has been extensive, encompassing everything from data mining to algorithms to search.

He is also a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University. According to his bio, Raghavan has “co-authored two textbooks, on randomized algorithms and on information retrieval.”

The Berkeley PhD had been CTO at Verity and had held a number of jobs at IBM Research.

More to the point, he was very well respected within the company, which seems to be curtailing its commitment to research as it attempts to turn itself around under the new leadership of CEO Scott Thompson.

Raghavan had been made head of strategy under former CEO Carol Bartz, who was fired.

He has been at Yahoo seven years.

Yahoo said it has hired former Microsoft exec Blake Irving (pictured here) as its chief product officer.

Reporting directly to CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo (YHOO) said in a statement, Irving will “lead the company’s products organization, which is responsible for the vision, strategy, design and development of Yahoo!’s global consumer and advertiser product portfolio.”

In other words, the exec many think the company desperately needs to spur innovation.

Irving replaces Ari Balogh, who announced last week he is leaving the company as of June 3.

Balogh was also CTO, but Yahoo did not say who would get that title.

In related news, Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs as chief scientist, will now report directly to Bartz.

The Yahoo announcement confirms a post BoomTown wrote last week about the company’s effort to hire Irving, a longtime Microsoft (MSFT) exec whose last job there was corporate VP of its Windows Live Platform group.

He left the software giant several years ago to spend time with his family and had been teaching at Pepperdine University.

Irving had been at Microsoft for 15 years, always commuting to its Redmond, Wash., headquarters.

According to his Facebook page, Irving now lives in laid-back San Luis Obispo, midway between Silicon Valley and Los Angeles.

Sources said after time off, Irving had recently become eager to re-engage in the Internet sector.

Yahoo has long wanted to hire Irving, many said. And in nabbing him, the timing is fortuitous, as the company is in the midst of launching its massive search and online advertising partnership with Microsoft.

The hiring also stems the tide of Yahoo’s exec exodus. Balogh’s parting is one of many among top Yahoo execs recently. Ad sales head Joanne Bradford departed the company to join Demand Media, while longtime tech exec Ash Patel said he would not return from a sabbatical he took last year.

Here’s Irving’s post on his own hire on Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal blog:

Yodeling Hello to Yahoo!

As the newest Yahoo! employee, at the risk of being highly corny, I’m delighted to yodel my first purple-hued shout-out to the 600 million people and tens of thousands of advertisers and publishers who enjoy Yahoo!’s products every day.

Some of you might ask why anyone would say goodbye to surfing and cycling the Central Coast of California or travelling the globe with their family to take on the job of leading products and technology at Yahoo! My answer’s pretty easy–meet just some of the brilliant people at Yahoo! that want to change the world, and then scan the amazing list of leading products around the globe these people have delivered at scale. When I think about what this company has meant to anyone who has used the Internet, worked in the Internet industry, or wanted to reach people across the world, there is simply none better.

From wildly popular services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr and Yahoo!’s mobile sites and apps, to Yahoo!’s best-in-class content properties like Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Sports, to many, many other great products across the world, Yahoo!’s product portfolio continues to be the envy of the industry. Those incredible services and their respective audiences bring tremendous value for advertisers, which is why Yahoo! serves up 10 billion ads across its network every day and is the #1 publisher of online display advertising. How can anyone not want to be a part of that?

And that’s just what consumers and advertisers see from the outside. Inside Yahoo!, there’s technological and scientific brilliance everywhere you look. With 500 patents, one of the world’s largest cloud computing infrastructures, and top scientific talent across computer science, machine learning, economics and social sciences, I’m awed at the caliber of people I’m going to be working with. The intellectual horsepower doesn’t stop there–I’m looking forward to working with some of the smartest and best-in-class talent around the world in marketing, advertising sales, partnerships, programming, service engineering and operations. The commitment Yahoos have shown over the years to delivering the best experience to both consumers and advertisers is one of the key things that attracted me here. We’re in the business of delivering bespoke experiences to our consumers, partners and advertisers and I’m looking forward to working with all of you to build on that reality.

This week marks an exciting new journey for me personally, and I’m thrilled to be sharing my experiences and background with the world class people at Yahoo! We have big opportunities, as well as big challenges ahead of us, and I’m getting ready to dive in and work with this great team to make Yahoo! even more central to daily online life than it has been over the past decade and a half.

My first day in the office will be May 17th and I can’t wait to get started. Stay tuned for more as I get settled and dig in with my new team.

‘Nuff said.

–By Blake Irving, Future Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!

And here’s the official press release:

Blake Irving Joins Yahoo! as Chief Product Officer

Chief Scientist Position, Held by Prabhakar Raghavan, Elevated to Report to CEO Bartz

Sunnyvale, California–April 19, 2010–Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) today announced the appointment of Blake Irving as Chief Product Officer. In related news, Prabhakar Raghavan will continue to lead innovation efforts at Yahoo! Labs as Chief Scientist. Both Irving and Raghavan will report directly to Carol Bartz, CEO. This new leadership will focus on speeding key inputs and decision making into product strategy and direction.

Ari Balogh, current head of products and technology, will be leaving the company on June 3 for personal reasons and will work closely with Irving to ensure a smooth transition. Irving will assume the position on May 17.

“Blake brings to Yahoo! genuine large scale Internet expertise from a mature company known for world-class technology. In addition, Prabhakar has invaluable technological insights and expertise that I look forward to having my executive team hear more directly,” said Bartz. “With leaders like Blake and Prabhakar, I am confident that we will increase technological innovation and deliver against our vision to be the center of people’s online lives.”

“Yahoo! has an impressive product and technology portfolio that has provided unparalleled value to its customers at scale,” said Irving. “I look forward to working with the team to bring forward more unique and highly personal experiences to Yahoo! consumers, deliver on the company’s promise of Science, Art and Scale to Yahoo! advertisers, and develop the amazing talent at the company so we may continue to deliver more and faster innovations to the market.”

As Chief Product Officer, Irving will lead the company’s products organization, which is responsible for the vision, strategy, design and development of Yahoo!’s global consumer and advertiser product portfolio.

Irving was most recently a professor at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management in Malibu, California. In his prior role as corporate vice president of the Windows Live Platform group, Irving led a team of 4,000 to build and operate Microsoft’s Internet-scale services platform, advertiser and developer ecosystem. Irving also held a variety of development and general management positions at Microsoft.

Before joining Microsoft, Irving held development and product marketing management positions at Xerox Corp., Oki Electric Industry Co. Ltd. and Compaq Computer Corp. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from San Diego State University and a Master’s degree in business administration from Pepperdine University.

Raghavan joined Yahoo! in 2005, and serves as Chief Scientist and head of Yahoo! Labs. Raghavan’s research priorities include text and web mining, and algorithm design. Prior to joining Yahoo!, Raghavan was the chief technology officer at Verity and held a number of technical and managerial positions at IBM Research. He is a consulting professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and former editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Association of Computing Machinery. He has co-authored two textbooks on randomized algorithms and information retrieval. Raghavan received his PhD from Berkeley and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as a fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE.

BoomTown will be hoofing it elsewhere today, so I am missing Yahoo’s search event, called SearchSpeak, at its Sunnyvale, Calif., campus this morning.

Thankfully, I was at the Silicon Valley Internet giant earlier this week, getting a grilling from CEO Carol Bartz, and was able to talk to both Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP of Yahoo Labs and Search Strategy, and new hire Shashi Seth, the company’s SVP of Search Products.

Seth came to Yahoo (YHOO) recently via a short stint at AOL (AOL), and before that, Cooliris and Google (GOOG).

Both talked about the items on today’s agenda–a six-months’ look back at Yahoo search innovations, its upcoming Olympics shortcut on the search page, and a new mobile search app that uses a kind of Etch-a-Sketch drawing technology–using fingers, not keywords–to help users find stuff.

While not quite ready for release, the app allows you to search by drawing a line or a circle around the area you want to search.

“There is still a lot of room for innovation inside of search and inside of these kinds of apps,” said Seth in an interview earlier this week in which he outlined again the recent Yahoo strategy that focuses more on context, location and relevant content than just search boxes.

Raghavan also noted that despite the pending outsourcing of search technology to Microsoft (MSFT) in the huge search and advertising deal Yahoo struck with the software giant, Yahoo could still compete in both user experience and relevance.

He had better be right, since new stats from comScore (SCOR) show continued declines for Yahoo in search, compared with gains for Microsoft’s Bing search service.

In any case, Yahoo presses on, and here is the blog Yahoo has posted about its progress in search, as well as a video on search:

Yahoo SearchSpeak from Yahoo Search on Vimeo.

Looking Back at Six Months of Yahoo! Search

The last six months have gone by in the blink of an eye for the Yahoo! Search team. Since the summer of 2009, we’ve launched an amazing amount of new improvements in Yahoo! Search to deliver a more personally relevant search experience. Now it’s even easier to find and explore what matters most to you. Here are some of the highlights:

All-new Yahoo! Search

On Sep 22, 2009, we launched a completely redesigned Yahoo! Search in multiple markets around the world. The new page design aligns the experience across our new Homepage, Mail, and the search results page. This dynamic and integrated experience better understands what you are looking for so you can get things done quickly on the Web.

By rebuilding much of the foundational code for the SRP (search results page) design and core functionality completely from scratch, we deliver a faster Search page with many exciting new features:

* SearchMonkey structured data: You can explore results from key sites and narrow results using different types of SearchMonkey structured data, making it easier to see richer results from an increasing number of sites.

* Search Scan, Safe Search, and Search Pad: You can quickly access search features that make people’s online lives safer and easier, including Search Scan/SafeSearch (which helps protect you from viruses, spyware, and spam while you search) and Search Pad, our note-taking and research application.

* Query assistance: We’ve extended our powerful query assistance into the left-hand column of the page to allow you to easily explore and discover concepts related to your query.

* Image and video search refiners: We also apply this same design framework to our Image and Video Search experiences, where the left-hand column provides powerful ways to explore the things you care about most; including travel destinations, music artists, movies, TV shows, and celebrities.

If you haven’t tried it yet, let us take you on our tour that explains all of the features we delivered with this new experience.

Structuring the Web

We launched Yahoo! SearchMonkey in May, 2008. Throughout 2009 we’ve continued to accelerate the adoption of structured data across the Web and empower developers to innovate in search. In May 2009, we shared with you the key milestones with Yahoo! Search BOSS and SearchMonkey; We have over 70 million enhanced SearchMonkey results viewed by users every day; we’ve also increased the adoption of RDFa structured data by 413 percent since October, 2008.

By August 2009, we had expanded our coverage for enhanced results to multiple structured object formats including Video, Documents, Games, Products, Local Businesses, Event, Discussions, and News.

Great Assistance across Yahoo!

In November 2009, we extended our Search Assist features from the Web search boxes to the search box at the top of nearly every property on Yahoo! The new features take you directly to the information you need, whether it is real-time stock quotes or movie trailers. This also includes enhanced search suggestions and ways to easily navigate to your Yahoo! property of choice.

Discover Breaking News on Yahoo!

Starting in November 2009, we began including relevant photos, videos, and tweets about a breaking news story within the Yahoo! News Shortcut on our Search results page.

Local Searches Made Easier

We’re focused on making it easier to search for local businesses. Starting in December 2009, we displayed more Yahoo! local business shortcuts when you search for a business, even if you don’t include your location in your query. We also began providing new functionality directly within the local shortcut to refine results by neighborhood or nearby city right on the search results page. This further enhances an already great shortcut that provides more of the information you care about most directly on the search results page, including ratings, reviews, photos, and directions.

Twitter in Web Search

In December 2009, we started integrating recent tweets from Twitter directly into our Web search results page when you search for buzzy topics. You can see tweets about newsy topics in the Yahoo! News shortcut. You can also see tweets about topics that may not be in news headlines on the bottom of the search results page.

Great Multimedia Search

Building on the great feedback we received, we added even more entertainment refiners within our Image and Video Search experiences. These new refiners help you explore your favorite TV shows and movies, celebrities, or the albums and songs from your favorites music artists.

By hooking into the “Web of Things,” we have created intelligent contextual refiners to narrow down your search intent intuitively.

Shashi Seth joins Yahoo! Search

Finally, a very exciting change for Yahoo! Search happened just last month when Shashi Seth joined us as the Senior Vice President for the Yahoo! Search Products team. We’re sure that Shashi will help us keep the ideas flowing as we continue to make Yahoo! Search better and incorporate Yahoo! Search into all Yahoo! products.

We’ve been working hard to help you find the information you want in one place when you use Yahoo! Search. We are focused on improving the Yahoo! Search experience, so check back often as we bring you more enhancements in the coming months.

Larry Cornett
Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search

And here is a link to Yahoo’s blog on its Olympics search.

This Weekend Update is particularly exciting because of all the things happening here at All Things Digital. There is, of course, the upcoming D7 Conference, which promises to be more tech-extravaganza fun than a tweet from @sockington (if only half as cute), but this past week has also seen the launch of our very own iPhone app, meaning ATD has gone mobile–smart news for your smartphone (we’re still working out potential taglines).

Like past D: All Things Digital conferences, D7 boasts a great lineup of speakers and industry leaders. This year, the gang that’s all here is full of personality, wit, chutzpah and all that other good stuff that’s sure to make this one of the most interesting and revelatory events yet.

For instance, Microsoft (MSFT) is rumored to be debuting its latest upgrade to its search engine, Kumo, at D7. The conglomerate sorely needs a win here, especially in its losing battle to the ubiquitous Google (GOOG) for market share in search. Search was a big topic in general this week as Kara Swisher liveblogged Yahoo’s (YHOO) “chalk talk” and interviewed one of its speakers, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy Prabhakar Raghavan, an exchange in which Kara gets Raghavan to exclaim WOO! for “web of objects.” In addition, Google search bigwigs Larry Page, Eric Schmidt and Marissa Mayer could be found across several universities this week dispensing “be more lazy” speeches to fresh graduates.

This was also the week with the IPO for OpenTable, the online restaurant reservation company being the first in Silicon Valley to go public in a long time. Kara Swisher and John Paczkowski give their takes on the offering.

It was also a week of many faceoffs. Here’s a smattering of those that went tete-a-tete this week:

• Craigslist vs. Henry McMaster. Winner: Craigslist. The online classifieds site retaliated with a lawsuit of its own after the South Carolina Attorney General threatened legal action.
• Microsoft vs. the European Commission: In the latest antitrust case development, Microsoft and the EC have been going head to head over scheduling issues, of all things.
• L’Oréal vs. eBay. Winner: eBay (EBAY). L’Oréal lost its latest lawsuit against the Web auctioneer over trademark-infringing cosmetic products sold on the site.
• CollegeHumor vs. Amazon: More of a prank than a bout, CollegeHumor gamed Amazon’s (AMZN) system by artificially driving up sales of the Three Wolf Moon T-shirts, complete with outlandishly positive product reviews.
• Comcast vs. Disney: Though Comcast (CMSCA) wasn’t pleased with Disney’s (DIS) partnership with online video site Hulu, the two companies were able to put aside their differences to form an ESPN360 pact.

More next weekend, but in the meantime, look out for all our coverage of D7!

Yesterday, Yahoo’s top search execs had a little sit-down with reporters and bloggers, including BoomTown, about some of the search innovations it has been working on.

It was no coincidence, since Microsoft (MSFT) is expected to launch a massive overhaul of its search offering next week at the D: All Things Digital conference that Walt Mossberg and I host annually.

After the presentation, which focused on open, mobile, consumer intent and the “Web of objects, not pages,” which Yahoo (YHOO) is calling WOO (no, really, WOO), I got a chance to chat with Yahoo’s Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy, about all that, as well as competition with Microsoft and search leader Google (GOOG).

I also got him to cheer: “WOO!” My work is done.

Here’s the video interview:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090520/yahoo-search-guy-raghavan-speaks-actually-he-woos/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20090519/liveblogging-the-yahoo-search-chalk-talk-kill-the-10-blue-links/ http://allthingsd.com/20090519/liveblogging-the-yahoo-search-chalk-talk-kill-the-10-blue-links/#comments Tue, 19 May 2009 19:05:15 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=13726

BoomTown liveblogged Yahoo’s “chalk talk” about search earlier today, which was an update of what the Internet giant is up to in the competitive space that includes Google and Microsoft.

Presenting at the event were Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy; Larry Cornett, VP of Consumer Products; and Marc Davis, chief scientist of Yahoo Mobile.

At its HQ in Silicon Valley last week, Google put on a similar show-off, called “Searchology,” about its own latest search innovations.

And although they are clearly No. 1 and No. 2 in the search space, both Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) are bracing for the launch a major overhaul of the Microsoft’s (MSFT) search offering, which is expected next week at the D: All Things Digital conference and code-named “Kumo.”

11:45 a.m. PDT: A delightful lunch was offered to a room full of tech reporters at the San Francisco offices of Yahoo’s outside PR firm, Outcast Communications.

But all the munching was quickly swept aside by the aggressive tone of the speech to be delivered by the normally gentle-looking Yahoos.

Apparently, top Yahoo execs want to “kill the 10 blue links.”

Yipes!

“Nobody really wants to search,” said Raghavan, describing a broken consumer experience and how Yahoo wanted to fix it. This has been a bell he has been ringing from last fall, in fact.

But we all were soon deep in the weeds of tech, as he noted that Yahoo wanted to move from a “Web of pages to a Web of objects.”

It still sounded very, very Webby.

12:01 p.m.: Soon, Raghavan started to talk about Yahoo products, such as Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS), which he says has generated almost as many daily queries as Microsoft’s whole search offering.

Snap!

Next up was Cornett, who began talking about intent and how Yahoo was trying to weave what a consumer wants in with what is displayed.

That means “helping users accomplish that goal by connecting objects in the real world.”

He trotted out Yahoo’s Search Pad offering, which is simply a way for people to keep track of their searches online, instead of on a dopey scrap of paper that the dog eats.

Cornett also showed how embedded music, video and other structured data are inserted into mostly dull search results.

Yahoo, in other words, is going to know what we want and give it to us–even before we know we want it. Sounds like my mother!

12:15 p.m.: Cornett reeled off lots of stats about its SearchMonkey technology, which is a year old.

There was a picture of a monkey with a birthday hat, natch! (See here!)

SearchMonkey, according to Yahoo, is a “framework for creating small applications that enhance Yahoo search results with additional data and structure.”

Cornett then invited up Facebook software engineer Alex Moskalyuk to talk about building apps with SearchMonkey.

Lots of tech talk that was actually incomprehensible to the reporters gathered, although they all scribbled away (I, at this juncture, chose to eat another sandwich).

Here is one line: “Originally used XPath extractor, switched entirely to hCard.”

Welcome to my world! It’s like some telephone guy talking apart a handset and explaining the guts of the device, when I am only interested in making a call.

12:23 p.m.: Next up: Matthew Hertz of Pipl.com, a people search engine built on Yahoo’s BOSS.

People search was, he said, a “deep Web challenge.” Indeed, there needs to be an easier way of finding out about a potential date online!

Actually, Pipl is a nice service and useful too, and Hertz is right that Pipl should not have to reinvent the search wheel to take advantage of all the data already available on big search services.

12:29 p.m.: Yahoo’s chief mobile geek Marc Davis was up, talking about “answers, not just links.”

Now they’re talking!

Actually, mobile is a key search arena with the increasing popularity of smart phones.

That means knowing everything from movie times to weather to flights to cheap gas prices nearby immediately.

Twittery humanity needs to know now!

Yahoo’s offering is called oneSearch. which is also a good product. It better be. “For many people in the world, their phone is the way to access” the Internet, said Davis.

12:40 p.m.: Now, the Yahoos summed up “What’s Next?”

Let’s review: Kill the blue links! Intent! Objects! Open! Mobile!

Raghavan then gave me a great joke by using the term: WOO, which is Web of objects. Apparently, they go around Yahoo talking about getting to the WOO.

It sounded naughty and I liked it.

Time for Q&A!

A question was posed about how quickly Yahoo rolls out these technologies, which are often limited in “bucket tests” of smaller groups of users.

As soon as they can, of course.

Next question was about how WOO impacts online ads. “It takes us away from a marketplace of keywords to a marketplace of intent,” said Raghavan.

That means advertisers can eventually make better ads. Oh, joy.

Then a question about when links are appropriate and when rich search should prevail.

Well, it depends on the user!

Next, a question about the currently trendy “real-time” search–a magical power that the blogosphere has, in its infinite hype-osity, bestowed on Twitter.

Raghavan called it a “buzzword” and I agreed.

Cornett added, correctly, that it should be about precision and accuracy in search, as well as serving “fresh” data. Fresh was a diplomatic word for whatever the mostly useless tweets are yammering on about at any given moment, which are most pointless.

The next question was about how soon a lot of this cool rich search data gets to the masses. Answer: Some of it is in testing and some is live systemwide.

I then asked about whether Yahoo would shove out the bells and whistles if, say, Microsoft’s new search service has a lot of the same features.

Cornett noted that Yahoo will only roll out after testing showed good results.

In other words, Yahoo will kill (or drink) no blue links before their time!

More questions about rich data, with one that makes the point that Yahoo was originally known for “curation,” which was its original business as the Web’s first truly useful directory.

It was.

1:01 p.m.: Still more questions.

Someone asked the Yahoos to comment on a recent post on TechCrunch that said the company was not developing for BlackBerry and focusing intently on the iPhone from Apple (AAPL). An exaggeration, said Davis, which was a diplomatic way of saying the story was wrong.

Blackberry users can now relax.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090519/liveblogging-the-yahoo-search-chalk-talk-kill-the-10-blue-links/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090519/get-ready-for-a-liveblog-of-the-yahoos-search-chalk-talk-no-word-yet-on-erasing-googles-market-share/ http://allthingsd.com/20090519/get-ready-for-a-liveblog-of-the-yahoos-search-chalk-talk-no-word-yet-on-erasing-googles-market-share/#comments Tue, 19 May 2009 17:33:52 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=13706

Later today, as BoomTown reported last week, Yahoo is putting on a search party.

Well, not a “party” party–although there will apparently be some lunch noshing at the “Search chalk talk,” during which top techies at the Internet giant will talk up the strategy for its more innovative products, such as Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) and Search Monkey.

Presenting at the event with be: Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy; Larry Cornett, VP of Consumer Products; and Lee Ott, senior director, Mobile Search.

Yahoo (YHOO) has a search share that hovers around 20 percent, compared to the more than 70 percent that Google (GOOG) has.

At its HQ in Silicon Valley last week, Google put on a similar show-off, called “Searchology,” about its latest search innovations.

And, although they are clearly No. 1 and No. 2, both Google and Yahoo are bracing for the launch a major overhaul of Microsoft’s (MSFT) search offering, which is expected soon and code-named “Kumo.”

It will be interesting to see what Yahoo’s techies focus on, especially as the company’s brass continue to talk with Microsoft about a possible search and online advertising partnership.

I’ll be liveblogging the Yahoo event, which begins at 11:30 a.m. PDT.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090519/get-ready-for-a-liveblog-of-the-yahoos-search-chalk-talk-no-word-yet-on-erasing-googles-market-share/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090514/this-week-google-talked-search-next-week-yahoo-does-aka-kumo-fud/ http://allthingsd.com/20090514/this-week-google-talked-search-next-week-yahoo-does-aka-kumo-fud/#comments Thu, 14 May 2009 22:47:10 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=13564

Suddenly, search!

Earlier this week, Google put on a show called “Searchology” about its latest search innovations at its HQ in Silicon Valley.

And next Tuesday, Yahoo will trot out its search extravaganza, called “Search chalk talk,” during which top search techies will talk up its more innovative products, such as Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) and Search Monkey.

Could all this search blabbing have anything to do with a certain upcoming launch of a new search offering by a very rich and even more determined giant tech company?

As in: Microsoft (MSFT) and whatever it ends up calling its redone search product, code-named Kumo.

Since the launch is likely to be loud and splashy, the No. 1 and No. 2 search players needed to make some of their own noise in advance about their stuff.

So Google (GOOG)–which has a massive lead in search of upward of 70 percent–trotted out Udi Manber, VP of Search Engineering, and Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience, this past Tuesday for a media audience.

The distillation of the event was that doing search well is still really, really hard–a new kind of “rocket science,” in fact, as Manber declared.

(Google’s spaceship crashed a bit today, as it turned out, with an outage, which was blamed on a “traffic jam” in Asia.)

At the event, the search giant also unveiled some new bells and whistles, such as Search Options, including a “Wonder Wheel” and “Google Squared,” as well as “Rich Snippets.”

Not to be outdone, Yahoo (YHOO) will have its own confab for reporters and bloggers next Tuesday morning in San Francisco.

Presenting at the event with be: Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy; Larry Cornett, VP of Consumer Products; and Lee Ott, senior director, Mobile Search.

Yahoo has a search share that hovers around 20 percent, which makes the upcoming increased competition from Microsoft more problematic.

Which is why the company continues its talks with Microsoft about a search and online advertising partnership.

But until any deal is struck, of course, it will be competition as usual.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090514/this-week-google-talked-search-next-week-yahoo-does-aka-kumo-fud/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080710/yahoo-search-gone-wild/ http://allthingsd.com/20080710/yahoo-search-gone-wild/#comments Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:47:17 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=2292

Did Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang have an extra bowl of Wheaties recently?

If so, it could be a very good thing.

In what is most definitely much more than a glimmer of innovative spark for Yahoo (YHOO), the company has opened up its search technology to allow anyone to build their own search engine.

BoomTown even likes the aggressive name of the service, which is BOSS, or Build Your Own Search Service. It debuted last night in public beta.

The project is part of Yahoo’s efforts to open its technology to third-party developers, with the hope of extending its reach further.

Yahoo has made several initiatives in the open arena recently, including SearchMonkey, which lets outside developers add more information to Yahoo search results.

But BOSS represents a quantum level from that largely cosmetic offering, by letting programmers do just about anything with Yahoo search results.

While the technology is free and will not be Yahoo-branded, Yahoo will require that those who use it also use Yahoo’s search advertising, revenues in which partners will eventually share.

Yahoo hopes it can hold onto its slipping search share through, well, sharing of its technology, in essence, by letting 1,000 search engines bloom that are all powered by Yahoo.

Both Yahoo, as well as Microsoft (MSFT), have been trying with no luck to hold onto their share of the search market in the face of search juggernaut Google (GOOG).

And the attraction for partners would be to not have to bear the cost of creating a search engine, while at the same time getting to have a customized one.

“What this represents is a deletion of the fundamental barrier to search,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo Search. “We are removing that barrier for entry and you don’t have to replicate our efforts.”

Added Raghavan: “Anybody with a good dea will be able to get going without that upfront cost.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080710/yahoo-search-gone-wild/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080626/heres-the-official-yahoo-reorg-release-like-boomtown-said/ http://allthingsd.com/20080626/heres-the-official-yahoo-reorg-release-like-boomtown-said/#comments Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:59:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=2232 Here is the official Yahoo (YHOO) release about its much-anticipated reorganization. It is almost exactly what BoomTown reported previously (Dear Yahoo PR, please send me my usual fee!), except for more details on the specifics of its tech reorg. And, I tried desperately to ignore the annoying “starting point” phrase, while Yahoo did not, of course!:

YAHOO! ANNOUNCES REALIGNMENT TO SUPPORT CORE STRATEGIES

Centralizes Audience Product Development; Forms New U.S. Region;

Realigns Technology Organization

SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 26, 2008–Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced changes to its organization aimed at improving its products, technologies and execution. The moves support its strategy to be the starting point for the most users, the must-buy for the most advertisers and the platform of choice for developers.

Key elements Yahoo! announced are the centralization of consumer product development to enhance the company’s ability to release products worldwide; the creation of a U.S. region focused on bringing products to market for users, advertisers and publishers; formation of an insights strategy team; and enhancements to the technology infrastructure to optimize the use of data and improve coordination between product and engineering teams.

“These moves accelerate the ability of our deep and talented team to build great products, grow our audiences and improve monetization globally,” said Jerry Yang, CEO. “They are designed to put us in an even better position to leverage our leading global audience and capture the opportunity we see in the convergence of search and display advertising.”

Business and Product Changes

The company 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. Finally, 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.

“The changes we’re making today will help deliver superior global products for users and enable faster and better decision-making,” said President Sue Decker. “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.”

Technology and Infrastructure Changes

Yahoo! is making changes to its technology organization, led by Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh, to better position the company to execute on its strategic priorities. Principal changes are developing a world-class cloud computing and storage infrastructure; rewiring Yahoo! onto common platforms; and creating a stronger partnership between product and engineering teams.

“Since my arrival at Yahoo! earlier this year, we’ve carefully evaluated the best possible configuration of our technology group to support our business strategies,” said Balogh. “I’m excited by the depth of our team which—combined with the talent we continue to recruit—will execute even better under this new structure.”

In order to expand its cloud computing capabilities, the Company will form a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group, charged with developing a computing infrastructure that balances scalability with cost effectiveness. It will move all consumer-facing platform teams to the Audience Technology Group, led by Venkat Panchapakesan. In addition, it is putting new leadership in place behind Yahoo!’s search group, naming Prabhakar Raghavan to direct search strategy and Tuoc Luong as 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!’s Marketing Products Division, Connected Life and Corporate Marketing groups will continue to operate as they do today.

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