Yahoo management talking like search quitters again, please no more |
Yahoo! misery continues.
Sometimes I wonder what mind-altering substance is floating through the air ducts at Yahoo management these days. Or what eerie haze prompted me to buy stock in their company (remember: they haven’t always sucked!)? Some of their leaders don’t seem to be in touch with reality. The newest Dr. bizarro statement comes from Tapan Bhat, the Yahoo! vice president of Front Doors at a conference in Amsterdam saying:
“The future of the web is about personalization. Where search was dominant, now the web is about ‘me.’ It’s about weaving the web together in a way that is smart and personalized for the user.”
Deja vu? Remember CFO Sue Decker kicking off 2006 with this insanely stupid comment: “It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.”
A muzzle company sounds like a good Y! acquisition right about now.
Maybe it’s me that’s out of touch and not Mr. Bhat but search is a lot more important to me than personalization. Too many non-sticky sites assume I actually want some semi-crippled personalized page on their site or that personalized results will have me returning repeatedly salivating like Pavlov’s dog. Sure, I don’t mind having a page that can aggregate favorite content from some sites and I like the ability to fill out my own profile (with external links) at a website but that’s a different activity than using a search engine. The incessant need to add social features to everything these days is becoming idiotic.
Anxiously waiting for the anti-social network movement to begin just to balance the scales again.
Bhat has followers in his belief like Zillow Community Relations Specialist Drew Meyers who writes:
search is becoming less and less relevant by the day as I add trusted sources of information to my feedreader. Everyday, I seem to do fewer and fewer searches.
Not me, Drew. At least not according to the Google trends graphs I’m seeing. It’s 20-30+ searches every day, same as a year ago. I’m not expecting results increasing from personalized results versus traditional SE results any time soon. No more than I trust Zillow estimates to be very accurate do I trust personalized results to be the most relevant.
At least Rex Duff Dixon and I agree: “Even though I don’t think human search is the answer, I don’t believe for a minute that search is over.”
When I look for results from a search engine I primarily want the most relevant results, not the most relevant result my friends or people on the web marked as friends or some trendy social network believes to be the most relevant. If I’m searching through information I created or bookmarked then that is one of the few times I’m interested in receiving personalized results. Help me find something I created days, months or years ago, absolutely that’s useful, but that’s a niche search result, not the most common one.
For example, I’m noticing that as the number of posts to this blog keep growing (4,300 and counting) the built-in search is becoming less useful. It’s been one of those things that has me pondering buying the Google Mini and experimenting. Search relevancy is important to me and if I’m going to buy a search product for this site, why not go with #1 (Google). I’m not interested in some heavily personalized search product, I’m looking for which engine will offer both myself and others the most relevant results. The ability to personalize results within the relevant results would be an interesting feature but first I want the most relevant result set.
There are some areas like shopping where personalization makes more sense. If I buy the Twilight Zone DVDs then I’m probably more likely to enjoy the Outer Limits. Personalization makes more sense there, but when I’m searching for a speciifc topic how does the search engine know my intention? Maybe it’s research for an article or blog post. Maybe it’s more information on a company, product or service. Maybe it’s a definition of a word (yes, I use the search engine for that occasionally). The point is I’d like to see the most relevant result across a wide variety of people and perspectives — people who agree and disagree or in the case of a product or service, the place that makes the product or provides the service.
Just because Yahoo can’t seem to figure out how to better compete against Google they shouldn’t try telling us the future of search won’t be about search. That’s a cop out. The future of search will be about the same thing it’s about today: providing the most relevant results. The format and presentation probably will change but the core component is when we use a search engine we are looking for something specific and want to find the most relevant result quickly and hassle-free. The job of the search engine is to be the quickest, cleanest and best at providing those results again and again and sorry Yahoo, you aren’t up to par.
This might be a good time for another “Are You kidding” post that Yahoo! isn’t quitting search. Yahoo’s biggest problem isn’t the search engine past, present or future, it remains Yahoo themselves. They have some really smart people working there, but it’s time to muzzle these managers now.
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It’s been a long time since I ever relied on Yahoo! for search. They may have started out there (after being a directory of course), but they should recognize the situation and gravitate toward their strengths. For me, Yahoo! is a news aggregator, sports news site and financial data warehouse. I track stock portfolios and sports scores through Yahoo!, but I don’t use their search engine. Why? Because it’s weak, simply put.
I still use My Yahoo! instead of iGoogle, because of the content customizations I’ve one over the years, but don’t necessarily want to do again with a new site. But Yahoo!’s not wowing me when it comes to search, and I don’t think they will.
Comment by Louis Gray — June 7, 2007 @ 10:48 am PST
Louis I’ve written (a couple times before) that Yahoo search wasn’t very good and shown specific examples and yet had Yahoo engineers emphatically disagree with me. If they are going to quit search then go back to using Google results and feed their strengths as you suggest, fine that might be a wiser strategy, but to have management keep coming out with these convoluted messages about their search-related aspirations isn’t helping them.
Comment by TDavid — June 7, 2007 @ 11:42 am PST
Here’s a question - wouldn’t accurate personalization party rely on excellent search results?
Comment by Webomatica — June 7, 2007 @ 12:48 pm PST
“Wouldn’t accurate personalization party rely on excellent search results?”
Fair question.
Guess it depends on what one intends to get out of the search results. When I search Google I’m rarely looking for personalized results, what about you? Exception: when I want to search through prior query results I’ve made. If I find something I want to save then I bookmark and tag it so that I can search through that in a separate query. If it’s something I write about then I do a blog search where I’ve posted.
Most search results at least I make wouldn’t be influenced by personalization. Word definitions? Nope. Research on a topic I’ve not searched for before (or recently in the case of news)? Nope.
Here’s are 12 of the real world searches I made yesterday:
1. howard stern (news)
2. original pong game
3. drobo
4. Kevin Mitnick (news)
5. ozzy (news)
6. pac-man history
7. how many pac-man games are there
8. other pac-man games
9. pac-man games
10. Toru Iwatani
11. microsoft home server
12. nas server
How would personalization have helped/improved any of these search results? Part of my research involved my curiosity with what the top results are from those that aren’t personalized.
Comment by TDavid — June 7, 2007 @ 1:05 pm PST
Hey, I think we are all forgetting that google makes its money of ads not search. So if yahoo can deliver more ads to more people they win the game. I think that overall yahoo might be a leader in markets other then the US. Which gives them a greater oportunitie to serve ads, they also haven’t pushed their product our ads your site like google has.
Comment by Alex K — June 7, 2007 @ 2:01 pm PST
Just to be clear - I don’t think search is over by a long stretch. But it is becoming less and less relevant to many people who are fairly heavy internet users.
Comment by Drew Meyers — June 7, 2007 @ 5:09 pm PST
Drew - I’d be happy to compare my internet usage to what you feel classifies as “fairly heavy internet user” and search isn’t becoming “less and less relevant” to me. You are speaking in wide generalities with no facts to back them up. With all due respect, I think your crystal ball is broken.
Comment by TDavid — June 7, 2007 @ 5:19 pm PST
Alex K - this wasn’t a discussion about what makes Google money, it’s on Yahoo management making moronic statements. But since you brought it up, our company has ran Yahoo Publishing Network against Google Adsense and their ads performed miserably and many times weren’t nearly as relevant (showing default mortgage ads for example). So Yahoo’s ad platform is no better from what we’ve personally experienced nor any of my webmaster friends that have run comparisons between the competing programs. So far I like Louis Gray’s thoughts the best: Yahoo should focus on their strengths.
Comment by TDavid — June 7, 2007 @ 5:25 pm PST
Well I have to agree with you that googles shit is better then yahoos. I would also agree with you that it might seem like its a moronic statement to begin with. What yahoo is saying first and foremost, in corporate double speak, is google has us beat by a mile in search. To combat that yahoo is going to be everywhere google isn’t , personals, astrology so fourth. They can’t just say google has us beat that would sound lame. Again this is a strategy that works MySpace is defeninetly not the “best” its the biggest.
So in that context what they are saying isn’t moronic these people aren’t stpuid they just feels its better to bend things a little.
To further my argument, when they say search is becomming less relevant I don’ think they mean for everybody I think they mean for yahoo, and that is how yahoo is going to grow.
in the end I think that they are on the same playing field they both have smart people, I don’t think that just because something sounds wierd that they are stupid, just mayby try to change the issue.
Comment by Alex K — June 7, 2007 @ 6:12 pm PST
TDavid-
You’re right — search is not over. When I’m looking for something random, yes, I still use google. My parents “live” on google. Everything they do online is through the google search box. However, I now rely on facebook, Techmeme, CNN, and my feedreader to bring me news and information. I already know the sources of news I want to read on a daily basis, so why bother searching? RSS gives me a way to have the information I want to be sent to me, enabling me to read it when I want, where I want. So maybe it’s just me that’s doing fewer and fewer searches, but I’m guessing there are many others too. But you’re right in that I don’t have facts to back up my crystal ball.
Comment by Drew Meyers — June 8, 2007 @ 9:08 am PST
[…] a Yahoo shareholder disgusted with stock performance and bonehead management statements the last five quarters, it’s good to hear there is a new (?) Yahoo […]
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