Thursday, July 10, 2008

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Pilgrim’s Picks for June 10

Posted: 10 Jul 2008 09:32 AM CDT

If you’re anywhere close to Charlotte, there’s still space for my talk on Online Reputation Management this evening.

Back to the news. Yahoo’s having a big news day:

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Yahoo Now the BOSS of 6,602,224,175 Volunteers

Posted: 10 Jul 2008 08:49 AM CDT

Forget the 20,000+ employees that help Google grow its market share every day. Yahoo just signed on 6,602,224,175 volunteers to help it grow its share of the search space!

6,602,224,175? A pretty impressive number, huh? That’s the current estimated population of the world, and Yahoo has just made each and every one of us an honorary Yahooligan, with the launch of its Build your Own Search Service–aka BOSS.

BOSS is a new, open platform that offers programmatic access to the entire Yahoo! Search index via an API. BOSS allows developers to take advantage of Yahoo!’s production search infrastructure and technology, combine that with their own unique assets, and create their own search experiences. While search APIs have been available for some time, BOSS removes many of the usage restrictions that have prevented other companies from using them to build innovative new search engines.

In other words, Yahoo has embraced an initiative I evangelize a lot in my work: when your customers are openly invited to help build your brand, they take ownership of it. What does that mean? Think about it. If you’ve built your own search tool–thanks to Yahoo’s infrastructure–wouldn’t you want to make Yahoo better? Wouldn’t you eagerly provide feedback, fix bugs, tell your friends how great Yahoo is, and, think twice before using Google?

If Yahoo’s BOSS takes-off, it could build market share from brand investment alone!

Add to that the increased audience reach, improvements, and revenue Yahoo will realize from BOSS.

For BOSS, we see a virtuous circle in which partners deliver innovative search experiences, and as they grow their audiences and usage we have more data that can be used to improve our own Yahoo! Search experience and as a result, improve the quality of results our BOSS partners and their users get. Second, we do see new revenue streams from BOSS. In the coming months, we’ll be launching a monetization platform for BOSS that will enable Yahoo! to expand its ad network and enable BOSS partners to jointly participate in the compelling economics of search.

So, what? You say. Google has APIs and doesn’t it allow you to build a custom search? Yes, but not to the extent that BOSS does. Here’s what BOSS offers:

  • Ability to re-rank and blend results — BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!’s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience
  • Total flexibility on presentation — Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements
  • BOSS Mashup Framework — We’re releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
  • Web, news and image search — At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we’ll be adding more verticals soon
  • Unlimited queries — There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day

According to Yahoo, companies are already taking advantage of BOSS:

  • Me.dium, a start-up that’s built an innovative collaborative browsing product used BOSS to build a web-scale search engine that leverages its real-time surfing data.
  • Hakia, a semantic search start-up, is using BOSS to access the Yahoo! Search index and dramatically increase the speed with which it can semantically analyze the web.
  • Daylife To-Go is a new self-service, hosted publishing platform from Daylife. Anyone can use this platform to generate customizable pages and widgets.
  • Cluuz, a next-generation search engine prototype, generates easier-to-understand search results through semantic cluster graphs, image extraction and tag clouds.

It’s hard to discuss Yahoo these days, without mentioning acquisition/merger talks. The only hurdle that Yahoo’s BOSS faces is that the company will likely get acquired, before it has a chance to make an impact on the bottom line.

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Linky Goodness, July 9

Posted: 09 Jul 2008 03:34 PM CDT

Oh my goodness, it’s Linky Goodness!

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Google Explains Ranking (Basically)

Posted: 09 Jul 2008 03:26 PM CDT

Today, Google Fellow Amit Singhal posts on the Official Google blog explaining Google’s ranking system. But before you all start salivating and clicking, note that this is a very “high level” overview—no secrets given away. Still, it’s a good reminder of the basics of Google’s ranking system.

Singhal writes that Google’s ranking system is based on three guiding principles:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  1. Best locally relevant results served globally.
  2. Keep it simple. [Thanks for not calling us stupid.]
  3. No manual intervention.

Now for the breakdown: [musical break, awesome choreography]

Ahem. Now for the interpretation:

Best locally relevant results served globally.
Despite the fact that Singhal says this one is “obvious,” to me this is the most oblique of all of the statements here. But yes, apparently he does mean that the best “local” result should be the best overall result:

We often call this the “no query left behind” principle. Whenever we return less than ideal results for any query in any language in any country - and we do (search is by no means a solved problem) - we use that as an inspiration for future improvements.

‘Kay, maybe I’m dense, maybe I’m just too bounded by the denotations of the words that he’s using, but . . . what? What he’s saying here sounds like “When queries don’t return good results, we want to improve.” That’s awesome. But what does that have to do with “local” and global results? Or does he mean that the best “local” result (results served in other languages/countries, not we would actually consider “local searches,” I guess) should be as good as the best overall result? That raises a slew of other questions.

Keep it simple.
The first principle “is obvious” and this one “seems obvious.” (I think I’m in for a headache, especially when he asks “Isn’t it the desire of all system architects to keep their systems simple?” Oh, if only.)

No, really, this is simple:

We work very hard to keep our system simple without compromising on the quality of results. . . . We make about ten ranking changes every week and simplicity is a big consideration in launching every change. Our engineers understand exactly why a page was ranked the way it was for a given query.

But no, they won’t tell you if you corner them at a search conference.

No manual intervention.
Singhal gives two reasons for this: first, that any one individual is too subjective to render good, objective results and second:

often a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and often for all languages.

This does come with a caveat:

I should add, however, that there are clear written policies for websites recommended by Google, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc).

Singhal promises more fun in a future post, promising to “discuss in detail the technologies behind our ranking and show examples of several state-of-the-art ranking techniques in action.” Excellent.

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