Mayer Is Aiming to Bring Back Search Tech to Yahoo | Hacker News Reader

Mayer Is Aiming to Bring Back Search Tech to Yahoo

recode.net

42 pointsrajbala47 comments

Is anyone else kind of rooting for Yahoo? I can't really explain why, because I hate most of the things Yahoo makes: Yahoo Answers, Tumblr, etc. but I guess I can't help cheering for the underdog.

Underdog status, charismatic groundbreaking CEO, Flickr, a possible rival to Google's de-facto monopoly, the possibility of an epic comeback story.

Yeah, you're not the only one kind of rooting for Yahoo.

You think the "long-time executive and key spokesperson for Google" and former lover of Larry Page[1] is out to kill Google?

If anything this just strengthens why I wouldn't root for yahoo.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page

former lover

Hell hath no fury...

The cynics will view Marrissa Meyer as a Google Trojan horse. I think its good to see some healthy competition in the internet portal space, especially as Google.com transitions from a search engine to a scraped content publisher serving advertisements.

Perhaps a lot of us also remember Yahoo as one of our first world wide web destination sites in the 1990s, so even if we don't care for the site today, we aren't cheering for its demise. They had bad leadership for a long time, their webmail saved their asses, and now there is a shot Yahoo could be around for another decade.

Search is really really hard to do, isn't it? I mean there aren't that many search engines, and even more prominent "alternative" engines (like DuckDuckGo) are often pulling results from Google and/or Bing...both of which have made fairly gargantuan investments in the technology and infrastructure behind their search engines.

Could there be some other technical genius way of doing it? Well...I'm sure there is, but would Yahoo really have the in-house talent to discover it before Google or Bing (or another wealthy potential Search entrant like Apple or Facebook)?

Sure, Marissa has been buying up talent, but that has primarily been mobile devs...

Yahoo used to have a stellar research group with tons of expertise in search, but alas, no more. There might be a few stragglers left, however.

What about purchasing DDG? Is that off the table? I don't know much about how that might work.

DDG doesn't have its own search engine. Instead it gets its search results from existing search engine (including Yahoo).

They get their results from 100+ resources, including their own search bot (duckduckbot), if I recall.

What I am sad about is there are no search engines that can return pure search results. The results you get are now tainted by DCMA takedown notices, censorship, and other various legal mechanisms.

Presumably there are specific domain names which do not respond to DMCA requests, while the search engines do. The others would respond to DMCA requests and thus results for them would be useless/dead. A project could aim to index these DMCA proof domains specifically?

I don't have a problem with the DMCA but I believe using it to censor a list of links is abuse and breaks the US's first amendment.

If you click on the notice, the links are right there. This is what I do when I see it in the google search results.

You are assuming their search has to be very good. Would it make a difference if the search was merely good enough. Search engines will generally get the most popular stuff well enough (eg "Justin Bieber") and it is the longer tail where they distinguish themselves. But does Yahoo need to distinguish themselves there?

Yes, they surely do. Bill Gates pursued a "good enough" search strategy 10 years ago that cost msft the business.

Google became popular because of their excellent performance on the long tail. Yes ~30% of all queries are for the same 50 search terms, but 50% are unique or nearly unique queries.

I'm developing buzzsumo.com, which focuses on searching for fresh content on a topic.

So when you search for "startups", you don't get official sites about startups, but rather the most popular stories about startups that's being shared the most.

This could be a great move. Google has moved focus on its search to advertising.

When searching "Hotels in San Francisco", the first organic search term is below the fold for me, which is a 180 from where Google was even 3 years ago.

The top black bar on the results page for the query you mentioned is called the "local carousel." Its an organic, not paid, result.

The same thing shows up for "Restaurants in X," "Museums in X," and the like.

I don't consider the black bar a result since it just links to another Google search with even more ads.

Google Hotel Finder pulls prices now for hotels from lots of sites which allows you to get more information than you could have before by clicking out to various organic links which seems to be a better user experience to me regardless of whether Google gets paid or not.

A query like "Hotels in San Francisco" is very commercial. Even the non-ads results are commercial and it's the same on Bing, Yahoo and duckduckgo.

Just curious what kind of results you are expecting.

When searching for "Hotels in San Francisco", you are almost certainly looking to spend some money at a hotel in San Francisco. The most relevant results ARE ads.

But are the most relevant results from places that have paid Google to be listed?

Weird. I did the "hotels in San Francisco" search, and I got that semi-annoying little ribbon at the top of the page listing a bunch of hotels in San Francisco.

I decided to play with it a bit, and selected the filter "4 stars or better", and it came up with an empty set.

I thought well, that's weird. Surely there are 4 star hotels in San Francisco!

So I kept trying to figure out what had gone wrong. It turns out the little ribbon is actually showing you results from the map that's down and to the right.

That's kind of cool, but there's no UI cues indicating that connection at all. Strange to see something so clumsy on a Google search page.

You'll need to keep in mind that Google is optimized for the average user, not power user.

That's interesting because I have never thought of Yahoo as a search engine. When I first encountered Yahoo, it was really nothing more than a curated directory of links. As soon as I discovered Google, I left it and never looked back.

They had a search engine for a while.

recently, yahoo web search has been integrated into tumblr (which has the worst possible search system I have ever seen).

That should provide some boost, but I wonder if it's considered in the market share statistics.

I was at the tumblr search meetup a few weeks ago in nyc. tumblr search is basically cached solr over bounded data sets, like most popular, last 6 weeks, etc.

the problem is it only searches tags, not content, and not all the tags either (as a mean to combat spam I believe).

Or at least it _seems_ so.

Yahoo doing search? I think that ship has sunk.

What exactly does Yahoo do these days? Mayer seems to be repeating history with her goings on at Yahoo.

I would love for someone to turn Yahoo around but I don't think it is possible. Might be time to sell to Microsoft.

Seriously, can she bring back the old/stable yahoo mail back first? The new my-yahoo page is no better, been a yahoo user for 10+ years suddenly the yahoo services becomes so much worse since she became CEO. sigh.

It'll be very interesting to see if she can manage to get out of the deal. It'd also take a monumental effort in recruitment and research to make a move like this a success, in my opinion anyway.

Yahoo buys DuckDuckGo.

But DDG gets its raw results from Bing?

Yep - but they have a strong "brand layer" (coining this now).

"Absolutely no brand-cuffs"

Is DDG really that much of a name brand outside nerd circles? Maybe I just have weird friends, but almost no one I know IRL has ever heard of DDG, while quite a few have heard and used Bing.

First you get the nerds, then you get the nerds friends, then you get the friends of friends, then you get the parents? :P

I think Yahoo will buy Bing within 3 months after MSFT brings in the new CEO. MSFT will be more focused on the enterprise market and Yahoo will use Bing to fight google.

"Curveball" seems an apt name - trying to SPIN hard enough to get someplace new...

Buy Yandex !

This is an interesting idea - Yandex isn't great in English but I'd guess with time they could get there if they focused, their raw tech is probably superior to Bing and they've been working on the problem for a long time.

Have not checked out Yandex in awhile. Seems like they are up to some interesting stuff: http://beta.yandex.com/ (Wish I could read the webpages in the video though)

2014 is the year for Yahoo

I don't know, can Yahoo! buy Google? I don't think she can write that check.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com