What's happening at Yahoo | Hacker News Reader

What's happening at Yahoo

wonko.com

87 pointsbluesmoon37 comments

I'm sure Yahoo has realized since I was there that it's important to be more hacker-centric, just as they've realized search is more important than they thought. The problem (in both areas) is how far they fell behind during the time when they didn't realize either.

Disclaimer: Yahoo! Technology Evangelist

In some ways I'm actually glad you raised your views, because I'm not afraid of people peeking in to see what it's like now.

I'd still like to reiterate my point from the other thread. We aren't perfect, but not becoming Google isn't the definition of unsuccessful.

We have things we could do better, like everyone, and we'll work on those. Personally, the amount of support I've received from the tech community based on responses to PG's article has given me a two day smile.

I'm continually impressed with the things yahoo puts out, and it's usually pretty difficult to impress me. Pipes, yui, and yql are all exceptionally awesome, as well as the search API. However, I imagine if these were put out by google, there'd be some huge rave over them.

It seems unfair, and for some reason that troubles me.

It seems unfair, but is fair for a lot of people.

You know what troubles me? Imagine using a powerful search engine and they decide to sell the first 2 pages of search result to the best bidder.

Now imagine that they put the search in some difficult place so you are forced to see "their portal" you don't care about every time you want to search anything.

Now they put their links before to their portals in the search results too.

Add images ads all around the screen, making it slow to search(you need to load all images first).

Make the ads to blink.

Put the ads in a popup screen blinking all the time, that you have to close for searching.

Now imagine that a competitor "does the right thing". They care about the user, don't sell priority on search, don't annoy their users with images, they get what they need in a superfast text page.

This company will get my "unfair" support, and the other company my "unfair"contempt and oblivion. No matter now they do the same that the other company, because they were forced and will came back if they can.

It's interesting - all these things you mention are business decisions, not technically engineering decisions.

Yahoo has great tech products. Even during the heyday, the engineers seem to have been aware of what was going on, it just seems that the "suit monkeys" took things over and made a lot of short-sighted business decisions.

I'm reminded of the famouse Google quote (something along the lines of, when the VC's gave google money, they asked, "are you going to be run by marketing or by sales?" Page's response: "Neither, by engineering!"). It seems as if Yahoo is a great tech company run by sales people (or more apt, "media people").

The same could also be said about Microsoft. The smartest people I know all currently work there or have worked there -what's "holding them back" (in relative terms, of course!). Is it their business people and their internal politics? Sure looks that way after the Kin fiasco.

> Now imagine that they put the search in some difficult place so you are forced to see "their portal" you don't care about every time you want to search anything.

A "difficult place" like http://search.yahoo.com/? That's existed for a good 5 years. And it's a completely lie that the first 2 pages of search results was paid results.

I'm not a Yahoo"!" Technology Evangelist, but I want to express my agreement with sh1mmer. Being Google isn't the only definition of success. Yahoo is the best company in the world at selling online ad space. Search advertising makes way more money, but that doesn't change the fact that Yahoo is #1 in the market that they chose. They aren't doing bad in terms of media companies, either.

As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about online advertising, I have nothing but respect for Yahoo. Holding them to the bar of "why didn't they become Google" seems a bit unfair, like a relative of an early hacker asking "Why weren't you as successful as Bill Gates?"

Disclaimer: I worked at a startup that was purchased by Yahoo and I'm obsessed with online advertising.

I didn't "raise my views." You're either misinterpreting the original essay, or misinterpreting the comment above.

Possibly both, neither intentionally. Happy to be corrected.

What does this objection mean, Paul?

My interpretation of his comment is that by "raise your views" he meant "express your opinions publicly" (using the "bring to the surface" meaning of raise), not that your opinion of Yahoo! has somehow changed or improved in the last 2 days.

Correct.

Yahoo's got many parts, Search came over from Inktomi and they've got a good culture. Unfortunately the executives decided to STOP doing search.

YDN, YUI, Flickr, and a few other parts of the organization are pretty good.

But in general, the management is more interested in things like "ONE YAHOO" than innovation. There is tremendous pressure to get everybody marching in the same direction, doing what they are told.

I mean, there was a big push at one point for the Yahoo OS. To give you a sense of how non-hacker yahoo is, OS did NOT mean operating system!

It's a culture driven by a huge heavy bunch of PM's who mostly spend their time doing terrible powerpoints, fighting, and trying to get each other fired. A few sections of the company managed to escape that fate, but the general culture is toxic.

As someone who's interviewed dozens of yahoo's fleeing the big purple Y over the past two or three years and I have seen no evidence what so ever that yahoo has a hacker culture.

I've primarily been interviewing people from search and ads, so perhaps my view is skewed.

Your view is skewed, but positively.

Search is (or at least was) one of the good areas of Yahoo for technologists.

I think Yahoo's search division is quite different from the rest of yahoo; yahoo's search division, at least when I left it a few years back, was still very heavily influenced by inktomi, and from what I saw and felt, it was a Engineering/hacker driven culture.

(now how different is it from the rest of yahoo? honestly, I don't know. I never worked anywhere else.

Wait - isn't Yahoo's search now powered by Bing? The author says that he was at Yahoo search - but what hacking can there be in that department today if you no longer have a search engine?

This is a common misconception.

Yahoo's algorithmic search is powered by Bing. But that's like saying DuckDuckGo can't innovate because Gabriel uses Yahoo, Wikipedia and other APIs to get data.

Microsoft have partnered with Yahoo! to provide the core matches but what we do with those is up to us.

and who's running the adwords-like part of the business? Still Overture? Funny how MSFT does not understand that's where the money comes from, and where improvement is most needed.

Maybe MSFT are focusing on getting the search experience right before worrying about money. That's a very startup-like approach to doing business and probably the best thing they could go given their reputation in the search market.

startup-like? How many hundred million dollars have they lost so far?

I don't know many Overture people still left in the Search Marketing division. Over time most of the historical Overture teams were sidelined and all the important work moved to the main offices in and around Sunnyvale.

(I worked for Overture for 1.5 years before the acquisition, and then Yahoo for another 5 years. I left about 2 years ago.)

Both algo and paid results at Yahoo! are still powered by Yahoo!

We have a deal to transition both of them to be powered by Bing. It is still in testing. Algo results _in US_ are planned to transition in the Fall. Other countries will follow after.

Paid results are planned to be transitioned in 2011

Well, author said it himself: he was at Yahoo! Search. Search is so technologically challenging that there is no choice but to have hackerish culture in this team (if you want this team to produce something). Microsoft Bing team (originally known as MSN Search Team) operated noticeably differently than MSN or rest of Microsoft, as time goes it changes, but still.

> If I had a crazy idea, I was encouraged not just to tell people about it (up to and including executives), but to implement it and see if it tested well with users.

Are there companies that don't encourage this?

Yes, try working at a major law firm where technology is something that's tolerated rather than encouraged!

Yes, the ones who looked at the whole Google background images debacle and decided they were prudent all along to put some sort of QA in place. (Despite all the conspiracy theories, Google putting background images on google.com for everyone without an option to turn it off was genuinely a bug made by one developer who pushed it out without needing approval from anyone else.)

That's very much false. I've worked with several of the engineers who were involved in that, and they went through all of the standard code & UI approval procedures. There was a bug in the ability to turn it off, but that also went through all of the normal code review & approval channels, it just wasn't caught.

Yeah, I think pg was way off on that one.

Could it be that pg's observations about how things were in '98 were realized at Yahoo around 2003 when Google ate their lunch and all the easy money was gone and they've since adjusted?

probably not. Look at who's CEO. And at how many smart people have left, from the Founders of Flickr and del.icio.us to Jeremy Zawodny and many many more...

I'd bet vastly more people have left Google (in both absolute and relative terms). Employees at both companies would have plenty of opportunities if they leave and little upward mobility if they stayed.

Paul Bucheit, Evan Williams, that same founder of del.icio.us and many many more too.

More founders leave Yahoo than Google Many founders of Google-acquired companies are still there (Youtube, Maps, ...)

Out of all companies acquired by Yahoo only founders of most recent acquisitions are still there.

Citation?

List of acquisitions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Yahoo! Founders can be found through CrunchBase Founders current status can be checked at LinkedIn

I know, it is a lot of work :)

Some cases where I am sure: Zimbra, Yahoo Groups, Flickr, Delicious

It's also possible that PG talked to executives... and executives everywhere seem like idiots to hackers.

I've met technical founders who were really sharp who listened and tried to emulate their business-focused partners to the point where they came off as kind of dumb to me. I watched this happen to one guy who was, by all appearances, smarter than I am at the beginning.

(Of course, he may still have been making good decisions; he certainly made plenty of cash; they just looked like stupid decisions to me, and, well, I ain't rich yet, so maybe he was on to something.)

Some things certainly changed. Coming in via the Overture acquisition (a company that was basically printing money and had one of the highest revenue-per-employee in the web industry), Yahoo felt extremely cost-conscious. For example, there was (and still is) a much hated process you have to go through to get any hardware purchase approved. So, that part of what pg said didn't ring true to me.

However, the ambivalence about being a tech company was definitely still there. The politics and the decision-making by people who didn't really understand tech was still there.

There's a lot of variation between divisions in Yahoo, but where I was was definitely not "hacker-centric". Projects were managed as massive waterfall efforts. Innovations by technologists were basically impossible to launch or test unless you had the right people in upper management backing you. There were these "Hack Days" that happened occasionally which some people in the company seemed to really enjoy. I don't know anyone in my division who ever participated in one, because we were too busy "getting real work done" and our management wasn't going to let people take a day or two off when we had deadlines to meet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com