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Comment by jaysonelliot | Hacker News Reader

It's surprising to me that Yahoo couldn't find a buyer for such a legendary brand as AltaVista. If it's just going to be tossed in the bin, give it to Duck Duck Go or some other company that's actually trying to do something new with search.

Yahoo's stewardship of the AltaVista brand has been shameful.

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DuckDuckGo uses yahoo's search api which is powered by bing. Yahoo research has released the most innovative papers on search but nobody is there to take this from research to product. Instead you find google and bing implementing yahoo's research, its amazing the quality of stuff that comes from there. I also noticed that a few of yahoo's top researchers going to their rivals and then working on search. This is why i didn't believe in the Marissa Mayer hire but i am hoping for the best. She is taking yahoo from a company with high intelligence to being a more low level media company like AOL, therefore most of their talent is going to waste, there is so many products they could be pushing out. The billion they dropped on tumblr could have be used to fund all those researchers crazy ideas, give them 10mill each to build intelligent applications that makes peoples everyday life easier, instead of buying CRUD startups to reach this goal.

If you look at yahoo latest earnings most of their money is coming from the Alibaba investment and their hedging of the yen, which seems to have been used to help pay for tumblr. Yahoo cannot buy their way out of this, just like steve jobs could not buy Apples way out during the 90's instead they had to use their human capital and innovate their way out. I don;t know who should have led yahoo but i do know that their biggest strength was their human capital which is being wasted and marginalized. It's even more evident when your competitors are implementing the research successfully and going further.

There is a great Q&A with Steve Jobs (I can't find it right now), where he explains that you can't sell billions of dollars of product simply by building interesting (or useful) things -- you have to develop a coherent strategy and think through how different pieces fit together. Similarly, you can't jump dump $10m on a hundred research teams, and expect to turn Yahoo around.

I used to be in academia and I'm running a startup now. I'm absolutely certain that generating computer science research papers, even brilliant ones, is a heck of a lot easier than the absolutely insane focus required to ship breakthrough products.

From what I can tell, Yahoo now has a phenomenal environment for people with this level of focus. As for the castles-in-the-sky research people leaving Yahoo, it's probably better off for both the research people and Yahoo. It's got a new business to build -- funding research papers that go nowhere does nothing to advance that goal.

This is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE

For those not initiated, OpenDoc was a multimedia document format developed by Apple before Steve Jobs came back to Apple, which was when he violently killed OpenDoc.

Killed it and allowed Microsoft to boss them around another couple of decades thanks to office monopoly. Google is now getting close to end this.

Google ending Microsoft Office's monopoly.

That's funny.

Honestly not unthinkable in this day and age. Maybe office becomes the corporate niche thing, and everyone uses g docs or a tablet/phone app at home.

I suspect an interpretation, if not grandparent's, is that one monopoly is being traded for another.

gdocs still has a long way to go. It's a harmless toy compared to Office, and I'm very far from being a power user.

Well, my place of work uses google drive exclusively. That's 60.000 people less paying office licenses for Microsoft...

Wish he was alive for a few more years :(

This is the power of branding. Even if Yahoo came out with better search technology than Google, it would be incredibly difficult to unseat it now - you would need to be at least one order of magnitude better, like Google was compared to Altavista when it stole its crown. And even in that case Yahoo would need to use a different brand anyway (like Microsoft is trying to do with Bing)

Steve Jobs certainly had a keen eye for business. You can tell from interviews. Probably one of the greatest businessmen in tech. To me, it's his greatest legacy.

Which are those papers you are talking about? I would love to read them at some point. Do you have them at hand?

Edit: Here they are: http://www.research.yahoo.com/publication

If this was a decade ago, I would agree with you.. but altavista has been practically dead for so long, I can't imagine who would buy it. It would be like asking who wants to buy WebVan or Pets.com... sure lots of people still remember the name, but what they stood for, what kind of company they were, etc is long gone, and no one is going to think for a second that the new company is associated with the original Altavista... they'll just be one more search engine out there.

Agreed. The AV search site has been a facade for other underlying search engines for a while, and I'm not sure what would cost so much about it in it's present form.

For me, AV was one of the first search engines that really took search forward a step, especially improving the quality and presentation of search results.

I can only imagine that the name is toxic now, and would probably convey negative value to a site like DDG. It was great back in the day, but now it's the butt of jokes if it's lucky.

I bet they just never thought of it as valuable, since it wasn't making them any money. If Mr. Weinberg was able to get through to the people with yes-power, they'd probably just shrug and hand it over. (I'm assuming here that there's a technocrat with marketing chops sitting in that chair, who can see what such a "gift" buys them in terms of developer street-cred. That might be sadly optimistic, but if it is, then it's exactly the thing Mayer is trying to fix--getting all their best wood behind the important arrows.)

I'm not so sure. I'm 22 and most people in my generation wouldn't know what AltaVista is. As would most non-techie I believe. And for the people who know what it is, the brand has absolutely no value.

As an ex-AltaVista employee, I don't really care about the brand; I care more about the underlying technology.

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