
Mayer Is Aiming to Bring Back Search Tech to Yahoo - rajbala
http://recode.net/2014/01/31/with-fast-break-and-curveball-mayer-is-aiming-to-bring-back-search-tech-to-yahoo/
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ForHackernews
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.

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MartinCron
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.

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lowglow
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page)

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sliverstorm
_former lover_

Hell hath no fury...

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sirkneeland
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...

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rogerbinns
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?

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gerbal
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.

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xGrill
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.

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jknightco
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.

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

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calbear81
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.

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RexRollman
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.

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mkr-hn
They had a search engine for a while.

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riffraff
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.

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siculars
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.

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riffraff
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.

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tnuc
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.

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ausjke
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.

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gavinflud
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.

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petervandijck
Yahoo buys DuckDuckGo.

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shadowfox
But DDG gets its raw results from Bing?

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

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jpace121
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.

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

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al2o3cr
"Curveball" seems an apt name - trying to SPIN hard enough to get someplace
new...

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linux_devil
Buy Yandex !

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jaredmck
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.

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niix
2014 is the year for Yahoo

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

