Yahoo Stepping Up Search Efforts

Dan Farber writes about Yahoo’s plan of a major investment from its nearly $500 million annual engineering spend to build out its own world-class research group. Yahoo has its sights set on Nobel prizes and making breakthroughs to ensure the future of the company. Search and creating more personalized user experiences that take advantage of underlying data and relationships is still in an infant phase. Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other major players understand that the spoils will go to those who provide answers, rather than links, and develop ways in which billions of consumers and creators of content can participate in an economic and social value chain. Raghavan, Head, Yahoo Research says he will be able to attract top talent given yahoo's standing and the opportunity to impact Yahoo’s audience, who account for 12 to 15 percent of all the Web activity worldwide (Yahoo’s numbers) and adds that Yahoo has an amazing pointing to "Ten terabytes of data, which for a scientist is pretty appealing.".
Raghavan acknowledged that moving research into products is a challenge. He listed improving search, building a better advertising platform, making better sense of social media, large-scale distributed computing, and developing incentive structures and tools as his goals. The future technology, according to Raghavan, is diving into the “deep Web” and semi-structured queries - it is about entity extraction, XML queries, unstructured queries, semantic ambiguity." On the back end, the focus shall be on solving the problems like spam and to "align the commercial incentives of a billion content providers with social good intent." He pointed to the field of mechanism design, a sub-field of microeconomics and game theory, as key to creating economic models that encourage people to participate in a clean, well-lighted digital marketplace with billions of content creators and consumers. Yahoo wants to turn its fragmented set of services, content and marketplaces into a cohesive whole and to aggregate, distribute and monetize the creative output of its users. Underpinning all of Yahoo's– dreams of growing to billions of active, transacting, content creating and consuming users is the ability to build an efficiency platform with millions of computers and data sets distributed around the globe. With 345 million unique users per month across 25 countries and in 13 languages, Yahoo, as well as its competitors–especially Google–has some experience in planetary scale computing. While the web has grown by leaps and bounds, the search research and progress is still at stone age – hopefully we shall see things change in the years to come.Quite a task cut out - but there is every reason to beleive that Yahoo should be able to pull this off.