Yahoo! 2.0

Stephen Taylor is the RVP and MD Search & Search Marketing at Yahoo! UK. Before Yahoo!, he was the MD of Overture Europe. I, on the other hand, am a little-​​known hack from South West London with a penchant for strong lager and pizzas. Stephen may also like those things.

How are the new changes to Yahoo’s homepage reflecting the mood and approaches of what we might call Web 2.0, and what remains the same?

It’s def­in­itely evol­u­tion. Ever since we started, eleven years ago, the heart and soul of our business has been to allow people to find and discover stuff on the web. A little more formally, there have been what we describe as four pillars to what we do on the site: content, search, com­munity and personalisation.

The redesign is intended to strengthen those things and to ensure that our front page reflects them in equal measure. There are more com­munity links and per­son­al­isa­tion oppor­tun­ities now, but that is both to redress the balance and because that’s where we think we ought to be. Going forward, I imagine we’ll have more per­son­al­isa­tion features and the ability to draw in more user-​​created content. This might include user’s pho­to­graphs, their own RSS feeds and community-​​created videos.

We’ve also started to use quite a lot of AJAX on the site [AJAX is a web tech­no­logy that allows pages to be updated without reloads, among other things]. It helps us to make better use of the space — so that email, mes­saging and weather can now occupy the same area of the page, for example. It also helps to make dis­playing new inform­a­tion far more seamless and hope­fully that keeps our users on the site for a little bit longer.

What’s happened to the Yahoo! directory?

When Yahoo! was first set up, then, yes, the dir­ectory was *the thing*. Back then, it seemed like there were only a few thousand web sites and you could cat­egorise and classify them and it seemed to Jerry Yang and David Filo that was what needed to be done.

Now, of course, the web has grown and that’s no longer such a sensible approach. Yes, we still have a few people working on main­taining it, but our focus has come to be on providing the best search results and our own content.

Will Yahoo! maintain and grow flickr and del.cicio.us, or will it blend them into its own branded product offerings?

We will build and enhance these services, definitely.

On the other hand, we need to be extremely sens­itive to those com­munities, the users who have created del.icio.us and flickr. In many senses, those sites belong to them to a greater extent than us. They have uploaded the pictures and shared the book­marks. We want flickr and del.cicio.us to flourish and grow organ­ic­ally rather than imposing things from above.

At the moment, we’re learning a great deal from both of those products. Flickr, in par­tic­ular, is very much at the cutting edge of web devel­op­ment. And, yes, we want to take what is good about those com­panies and feed it back into the rest of what we do.

What we’re giving back to these products is the infra­struc­ture and scalab­ility. I think a lot of services that are cur­rently very fash­ion­able lack the capital backing to be very scalable and they will fade away again before too long.

Yahoo! is very excited by the pos­sib­il­ities of user com­munities and sharing: our Yahoo! Groups offering was one of the first ‘social networks’, though we’ve never called it by such a trendy title.

How else is Yahoo! embra­cing Web 2.0 approaches?

On the tech­no­lo­gical level, we’ve already talked about the use of AJAX on the home page. We also employ it across other products. We’ve intro­duced it into our Yahoo! Local mapping services. AJAX simply allows us to present more inform­a­tion easily. Users will only come to a site and only stay for as long as there are things for them to see and do. The tech­no­logy enables this to be done more simply, from the user’s perspective.

We’re also deeply embedded in creating social networks. Yahoo! groups has been a huge part of our business for years, as I’ve said. In some respects, this isn’t a new thing at all. People have always wanted to com­mu­nicate with peers on the web. But now it’s become trendier than pre­vi­ously and also the tech­no­logy has evolved to let you do more with it. We’re now also offering the Yahoo! 360 blogging com­munity for people with self-​​publishing aspirations.

In addition, we’re deeply com­mitted to open API’s. From a business point of view, it’s central to us. Overture, now Yahoo! Search Marketing, has had an Open API for some time. That lets agencies develop their own views into the data. But so does flickr. Yahoo! Answers and our Yahoo! Local products will also have Open APIs. In the end, it means people are buying into our tech­no­lo­gies and that’s got to be a good thing.

We’ve recently launched Yahoo! Answers which arguably fits into the Web 2.0 approach. I don’t know if it’s the “wisdom of crowds”, but when I wanted to take my children ice skating at Christmas in New York, I didn’t know the best place to go. Yes, I could search for skating rinks in New York, but which is the best one for young children, at that time of year?

That sort of inform­a­tion has always been hard to find on the web because it’s dif­fi­cult for com­puters and search engines to process it. However, within a few minutes of sticking it on Yahoo! Answers, I had a dozen answers to my question, including several useful sug­ges­tions from New Yorkers. As we take the product forward, those pieces of inform­a­tion will be stored and cat­egor­ised and start to make our web search capable of answering very spe­cial­ised queries like that that haven’t been possible before. It’s a know­ledge database around what lies inside people’s heads. There are already millions of answers and it con­tinues to expand really rapidly.

What motiv­ates people to answer questions?

To be honest, I’ve been abso­lutely amazed by people’s will­ing­ness to share their know­ledge. I guess this will­ing­ness, which has never been picked up on properly before, is one of the big drivers of many Web 2.0 projects.

On Yahoo! Answers, you can reach dif­ferent grades by answering more ques­tions. But there’s no fin­an­cial or other incentive and yet people are more than willing to share what they know. It’s some­thing that I’m ser­i­ously impressed by.

Yahoo! is clearly investing heavily in user com­munities and user content sites. Is that not off-​​putting to brand advertisers?

The thing with advert­ising is that it’s the users who need to accept it for it to work. When we put sponsored, relevant results at the top of a search answer, it actually makes that search response better.

I’ve heard people say it’s off-​​putting on user-​​generated sites, but I think that’s down to the nature of the advert­ising. I think the advert­isers them­selves will need to think more cre­at­ively and lat­er­ally to find forms that attract the users of these sites.

In any case, we’re con­scious that there are things that you can and can’t monetise. We don’t monetise Yahoo! Widgets, because there isn’t a way to do that which users wouldn’t find dif­fi­cult to accept. Those things are more about giving more weight to the whole Yahoo! brand.

How will trends develop over the next couple of years, and what will disappear?

Well, if I knew that then maybe…*laughs* I think that there are certain things that are here to stay. Communities, sharing and user-​​generated content. The web has always been good for those things and it will continue to be. It’s a big part of how people want to use the internet.
Yahoo! has estab­lished support for the micro­formats that will drive the semantic web, which many feel is the next stage. It’s about making the content of web pages more under­stand­able to machines and there­fore more easy for humans to find and manage inform­a­tion. That may be some time in coming of age, though.

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