Posts tagged Yahoo’s
[Data Visualization] How Yahoo’s Homepage Delivers Personalized News to 700 Million People
Feb 10th
With all the attention focused on Facebook and Google, it’s sometimes easy to forget how many people visit Yahoo on a typical day. The site has over 700 million users and gets a massive amount of page views each day. As the company struggles to figure out what its future focus should be, one thing they’ve prioritized highly is content.
Every day, Yahoo displays about 13 million different news story combination on its homepage. Those stories are personalized based on demographic data and reading behavior, and the company keeps track of what kind of stories do well with which groups of people.
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To do that, Yahoo utilizes a complex set of algorithms it calls the Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (CORE). The system crunches 1.2 terabytes of data per hour to determine which stories to deliver to which users. The result is a line-up of stories on the homepage that’s customized for each user, based on calculations that take milliseconds to crunch as the page loads. It also lead to a substantial increase in engagement on Yahoo’s site, where click-throughs to news stories have increased by 300% since this technology was first implemented.
To illustrate how this works, Yahoo has created an interactive data visualization that shows visitor traffic data in nearly real time. Using it, one can drill down into specific age groups, genders and story types to see what people’s aggregate reading habits look like.
You can view and play with the data visualization here. They even designed the UI in HTML5 rather than Flash so you can check it out on your iPad.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
How Yahoo’s Homepage Delivers Personalized News to 700 Million People (Visualization)
Feb 10th
With all the attention focused on sites like Facebook and Google’s properties, it’s sometimes easy to forget how many people visit Yahoo on a typical day. The site has over 700 million users and gets a massive amount of page views each day. As the company struggles to figure out what its future focus should be, one thing they’ve prioritized highly is content.
Every day, Yahoo displays about 13 million different news story combination on its homepage. Those stories are personalized based on demographic data and reading behavior, and the company keeps track of what kind of stories do well with which groups of people.
Sponsor
To do that, Yahoo utilizes a complex set of algorithms it calls the Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (CORE). The system crunches 1.2 terabytes of data per hour to determine which stories to deliver to which users. The result is a line-up of stories on the homepage that’s customized for each user, based on calculations that take milliseconds to crunch as the page loads. It’s also lead to a substantial increase in engagement on Yahoo’s engagement, where click-throughs to news stories have increased by 300% since this technology was first implemented.
To illustrate how this works, Yahoo has created an interactive data visualization that shows visitor traffic data in nearly real time. Using it, one can drill down into specific age groups, genders and story types to see what people’s aggregate reading habits look like.
You can view and play with the data visualization here. They even designed the UI in HTML5 rather than Flash so you can check it out on your iPad.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Yahoo’s New CEO Pick Actually Seems Right
Jan 4th
Yahoo named PayPal president Scott Thompson its new CEO today. Scott who? Exactly. I’d never heard of him either. But with a technical background – and a need to prove himself, and no crazy Silicon Valley persona to stroke – he might actually be the right guy for the job.
Yahoo, like all media companies, must learn to become a better software and technology company, or it is toast. You can have as many pageviews and ad sales folks as you want, but if you can’t build great Web products – which demands great software, as well as great content – you’re not going to grow.
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Yahoo started out as a Web pioneer, but has since become a joke. Just go down its product list, one by one, and either laugh, cry, or scratch your head.
You can’t seriously tell me that Yahoo Mail, for example, is even in the same league as Gmail – even though some 100 million people still use Yahoo Mail. Or that Yahoo Finance, one of the most important financial news sites in the world, is as well-built or designed as it should be. (It’s no Verge.) Or that Flickr should be losing the momentum in photo sharing to Instagram and Tumblr. Or that Delicious shouldn’t have been Yahoo’s Pinterest long before anyone ever heard of Pinterest.
Hiring Thompson doesn’t fix those problems right away. It’s not like PayPal is a model Web service in 2012. But it suggests that Yahoo has a leader who understands serious technology. And as far as Yahoo CEOs go, that seems to be new.
As Adam Clark Estes writes for The Atlantic Wire, Thompson is a “huge geek.”
With a bachelor’s degree in accounting and computer science from a small private college in Massachusetts, he’s not your standard Stanford-educated Silicon Valley executive. He’s spent much of his career on the tech side of financial firms having spent much of his career at Visa and its various subsidiaries. Thompson also worked at Barclays Global Investors. He’s been at PayPal since 2005 having served as the company’s chief technology officer before taking over as president, but since PayPal’s part of the eBay universe, he’s not unfamiliar with what it takes to lead one of the world’s largest technology companies.
Ideally, he can now start to recruit high-end engineering and product talent to fix Yahoo, create new things, and help make it a respectable Internet technology company again.
Yes, Yahoo’s revenue comes from ad sales, and it’s important to have someone good in charge of that, too. But without great Web and technology products, where will the ads even go? So a tech-savvy CEO is arguably more important for Yahoo today than a CEO who has run a TV studio or used to sell banner ads.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that Thompson is the right guy, that he’ll get the board support he needs, that he’ll be able to recruit the right people, or that he’ll get the job done. His ultimate job, really, may still be to sell Yahoo to the highest bidder.
But for a company that has pretty much wasted the last decade, it’s a solid shot to do things right.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Yahoo’s Livestand Looks Really Nice, But It’s No Flipboard Killer
Nov 4th
Yahoo is getting super-serious about the role tablets will play in its future content strategy. On Tuesday, they launched IntoNow, an impressive social TV app for the iPad that marries the check-in functionality of GetGlue with the real-time content identification of Shazam. The next day, the company pushed out LiveStand, another iPad app, this one in the tradition of personalized news reading apps like Flipboard, Zite and AOL’s Editions.
The app, which comes in advance of Google’s own rumored offering, is pretty well-designed. It has less content sources than many existing players, but what it does have is formatted very nicely.
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One of the first things you’ll notice about Livestand is that it’s built to support multiple users. For families who share an iPad or other tablet, that feature will be appreciated. An app that displays personalized content is only really useful to its original user, and lots of families share tablets. The feature won’t be necessary for everyone, but it’s nice to know it’s there.
Pretty Layouts, But Limited Content to Fill Them
Rather than being a direct copy of the much beloved Flipboard, Livestand crosses that popular app with something more like AOL’s Editions. It’s a personalized content app, but it doesn’t pull content from your friends on Twitter and Facebook, nor does it let you plug in any old RSS feed your heart could ever desire. Instead, Yahoo has launched with a list of content partners, whose articles and blog posts are formatted in an attractive, magazine-style layout. From that list, which is anchored heavily by Yahoo’s own content properties, you can pick and choose sources that suit your fancy.
In putting it through its paces, we noticed a few minor areas that could use improvement. In some cases, the app only loads the first image in a given post. That’s unfortunate, because additional artwork could help make the lovely article detail pages look even lovelier. It’s downright unhelpful when the post we’re trying to read contains an infographic.
We hesitate to be too harsh, though. The thing did just launch yesterday, and on the whole it’s pretty solid.
For users who don’t necessarily want to trick their news-reading app out with any content source imaginable, Livestand is a worthwhile product. Users who are already happily settled in to an app like Flipboard, Zite or Pulse are probably going to stay there.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google, Bing & Yahoo’s New Schema.org Creates New Standards for Web Content Markup
Jun 2nd
The web’s three leading search companies are announcing today a new collaboration called Schema.org, where more than 100 new types of website markup for content like movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, places and more will allow search engines to better understand and present what they find on the pages that show up in search results. Yahoo announced the project first today on its Yahoo Search Blog and said it was reminiscent of all three search companies collaborating to create the sitemap concept.
This will change the way people design websites, it will change the way people do search marketing, it will change a lot of things. It should be very, very interesting.
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The work is related to Yahoo’s years-old Search Monkey project, where website owners were given guidance about how to mark up websites so that their appearances in Yahoo search results were vastly improved. Gone are the days of a blue link and a few lines of text in each and every case. Some types of discovered content are better displayed in other ways, with charts, graphs or images, for example. Now that Google and Bing are getting on board, I expect that just about every site on the web will be stopping to take a look and see how they can incorporate the new structure advocated on Schema.org.
Above, a screenshot of the kind of search results Google and others will be able to display. In this case, it’s easy to know what the cooking time for this recipe is because “cookTime” is one of 10 standardized fields in the recipe schema under schema.org, so there’s one standardized way to communicate cook time for a recipe and every 3rd party indexing a recipe web page will know what the cooking time is immediately.
Bing says of the project:
“We’ve made great progress on the technical front to begin to model the real world from the messy bits of data scattered across the web. Things like movies have benefitted from this work. We’re now able to understand ‘Casablanca’ is a movie and literally mine the web to re-assemble information about that movie from millions of sites.
But we think we can do better. We want to enable publishers to give us hints about what things they are describing on their sites. Rather than rely solely on machine learning and other AI techniques, we asked “what if we could enable publishers to have a single schema they could use to describe their sites that all search engines could understand?…We at Bing see this as a major step forward for the web, simplification for webmasters and richer more informative search results for consumers. As search continues to evolve from finding links to taking action, we’re excited about the potential this new system provides.”
This will change the way people design websites, it will change the way people do search marketing, it will change a lot of things. It should be very, very interesting.
Google’s take on the announcement is the most detailed and can be found here.
Here’s how I understand such work: technical standards like standardized markup for content types allows search engines and other sites to skip spending time and work figuring out what kind of content is on a page and move directly to the stage of doing something interesting with that content.
It’s not easy for a web service to know that a page is about food, or wine or a movie – but if all pages that are communicate that in a standard fashion, then 3rd parties like search engines can proceed directly to building beautiful food, wine and movie search results pages or other services that present the content in a more compelling fashion. That could make searching more pleasurable and useful and ultimately drives more traffic to the most useful and best formatted sites in the search results.
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Yahoo’s Top Mobile Searches of 2010 Reveal Mobile’s Real-Time Nature
Dec 2nd
Yahoo has released its year-end list of top Web searches, which identify the trends form the past year. There are a number of lists available, including the top overall searches, top searches by country and top searches in a number of verticals, like finance, sports, questions and “obsessions” (hot items throughout the year).
But we’re most interested in the top mobile searches, of course, and how those search trends compare to Web search in general.
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To begin, let’s look at Yahoo’s top search for 2010. For the first time ever, a news story (the BP oil spill) made it into this list, and not only that, but it reached the #1 spot. Typically, top searches are more entertainment or celebrity-focused, as the rest of the list clearly shows. But something about the oil spill encouraged the most searches. Not only did people check constantly for updates (“Is it capped yet? How about now? Now?!), Yahoo’s Web Trend analyst Vera Chan speculated that the news also tapped into our society’s deeper concerns about the role of big government in managing natural and manmade disasters.
Top Searches on Yahoo! in 2010
- BP oil spill
- World Cup
- Miley Cyrus
- Kim Kardashian
- Lady Gaga
- iPhone
- Megan Fox
- Justin Bieber
- American Idol
- Britney Spears
Mobile Search Trends, Compared
What’s interesting, however, is comparing the top searches list (above) to the mobile vertical. Here, the oil spill registered at the 10th spot – it didn’t even make the top 5. Why is that? Well, beyond wanting to know whether or not it was capped, really understanding the oil spill was a more complex, time-consuming process than is typically possible via mobile. Analysis of the proposed solutions involved being able to digest a number of details, then compare those details to earlier plans, failures and other options – a task that is often best suited to the “desktop” Web.
Instead, mobile users were after “breaking” news. Sports scores, like those from the NFL, NBA, World Cup and Olympics were hot on this list, for example. American Idol fits in with this group too, as it involved breaking “scores” as well (i.e. who was voted off that week).
Top Mobile Searches on Yahoo! in 2010
- NFL
- Lady Gaga
- Rihanna
- Sandra Bullock
- NBA
- World Cup
- Justin Bieber
- American Idol
- Winter Olympics
- BP oil spill
But what about the celebs on this list, why did they rank the way they did? Lady Gaga was likely hot on mobile because people were searching for her YouTube videos – the most watched videos of the year, said Wang. As for Rihanna, searches for both videos and lyrics were popular.
For Sandra Bullock, however, the news surrounding her this year involved continual updates. (Bullock, if you remember, ended up divorcing her husband after news of his infidelity was released.) But the news wasn’t just one big story that hit all at once – it was an ongoing saga where each day revealed more details.
Continual updates, real-time details, immediate access: that’s what mobile search is all about, whether sports, celeb or music – that’s the big takeway from Yahoo’s data reveal. It’s one of those things we already knew, but it’s good to see it backed up with actual data, too.
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Surveying the App Economy with Foursquare’s CEO, Yahoo’s CTO and NBA Digital’s GM
Nov 19th
At last week’s Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco, mobile industry leaders including Yahoo! CTO Raymie Stata, SVP and GM at NBA Digital Bryan Perez, and CEO of Foursquare Dennis Crowley, talked about the changing dynamics of the mobile Internet value chain and what opportunities there are outside of the iTunes App Store.
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Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is a media partner with the Open Mobile Summit.
The panel was moderated by Kara Swisher, co-executive editor of All Things Digital.
On Changing User Behavior
Swisher began by asking Crowley about his recent experience “checking in” while running the NYC marathon. Crowley explained he used two applications – Mayor Maker (iTunes link) an automatic check-in app and RunKeeper, which integrates with Foursquare and rewards people for exercising.
These types of “persistent user experiences,” such as the check-in, still require users to adopt new technology, though, said Swisher. She asked Yahoo’s Stata how you get user behavior to change.
“It’s fairly complex with you have 600 million users,” Stata said referring to Yahoo’s large customer base. You have to pull, you have to push, you have to track the changing user behavior, iterate, test and deploy new investments, he said. NBA Digital’s Perez responded that his company has a tremendous amount of pull, because people want information about sports. But push comes into play when users want to customize their experience and get specific types of notifications.
As far as check-ins, NBA is combining both “inside” and “outside the arena” check-ins. Even if you’re 3000 miles away, you can check in to a game from your couch, Perez explained. What the NBA is still trying to figure out is how to best incorporate everybody – there are a lot of reward-type applications you can do with these check-ins, both physical and virtual, he said.
Is the App Marketplace Sustainable?
Swisher then asked the panelists if the app marketplace was sustainable, considering the large number of applications now available. Crowley said that the iTunes App Store has actually enabled the app movement and the discoverability of mobile applications. His company isn’t too concerned with moving up and down in the app store rankings anymore, though – people are finding out about Foursquare through recommendations from friends. Plus, there’s a secondary market of services that help recommend great apps. He mentioned a company called Firstand20 which showcases the “app playlists” from well-known individuals and celebrities, as an example. [Editor's note: we have a fairly comprehensive list of recommendation services in this post, 4th paragraph.]
Yahoo’s Stata explained how the number of apps doesn’t have to be overwhelming. There are different kinds of apps – there are “evergreen” apps that are always in use, but there are also some apps are only played with for a little while, then cleaned up off the phone. He talked about how Yahoo missed an opportunity by not having a World Cup app, as an example of the temporary apps that could become hugely popular for a set period of time. Next time Yahoo will have a World Cup app, Stata said.
On Developing for All the Different Platforms
Perez said that keeping up with all the different formats is difficult, but admitted, “that’s the business we’re in.” At first, the NBA was developing for iPhone, Android and RIM (Blackberry), and now that’s beginning to expand. He also mentioned that the company is selling more Android apps that iPhone ones these days. And it plans to reuse its mobile codebase to build tablet apps, too. However, the challenge for his company isn’t all the platforms it has to work on, but the challenges in building for an international market.
Crowley agreed, and added that the problem is not rolling out apps for different platforms – it’s maintaining them. He said Foursquare really wants to build an iPad app, but doesn’t have the resources to maintain it. He hopes by having an API, third-party developers will help grow the app ecosystem.
Stata said getting Yahoo is focused more on getting a consistent user experience across devices. In terms of scale, using standard Web technologies is better than native apps, he believes.
Monetization Strategies
In terms of monetization, Crowley said Foursquare is thinking more about how it can offer users “better coupons,” and better ad products in general to enable businesses to better reach their customers. Swisher asked if he would ever start selling products to users who check-in, but Crowley said no.
According to Perez, the NBA has moved to more of a freemium model. You can pay for ad-free experience, live video, on-demand, that sort of thing, he said.
In terms of advertising, Yahoo’s Stata responded to a question about iAd and how it compares with what Google’s doing and where Yahoo fits in. “Let’s put it this way, Apple probably has some lessons to learn about how to be an effective partner with advertisers,” he said. Meanwhile, “Google’s volume is good, but it’s kind of a detached experience.”
Yahoo, said Stata, recognizes the “art in advertising” and its creative side, and can scale that with its advertising products.
Perez said that although NBA doesn’t participate in iAd currently, he loves the innovation it delivers. However, he’s unsure if it can scale like an ad network can. Plus, “throwing another gatekeeper in that process…will slow it down,” he said referring to Apple’s level of involvement with the platform.
Foursquare said his company is more focused on trying to invent “new forms of advertising” through brand and media partnerships. Badges are like an ad that never existed before, said Crowley. However, Foursquare doesn’t want to get involved with “virtual” check-ins, where users check in to a TV show they’re watching, for example. That was somewhat of an odd statement, considering that Foursquare’s partnership with RunKeeper involves users “checking in” to their runs. It even detailed the news in a blog post titled “Unlock badges without checking in.” Apparently, the RunKeeper partnership was a one-off, not representative of Foursquare’s general direction? That remains unclear.
Are Tablets Mobile?
Swisher then brought up Facebook CEO’s Mark Zuckerberg’s comment that tablets are not mobile, and asked what the panelists thought about that.
Yahoo said that some people have a narrow definition of mobile, but actually there are a lot of “connected devices.” The question is what context are these devices used in and where are they being used? That’s how you can determine what devices should be considered computers vs. connected devices vs. mobile devices.
Crowley agreed, saying that you can also look at whether the device is being used for content creation or content consumption.
What’s Being Overhyped?
At the panel’s conclusion, Swisher asked about what technologies are being overhyped and underhyped right now. Stata said the general trend involving the shift to mobile is key, but he doesn’t really think in terms of “hype.” Perez said that location-based services are actually under-hyped – there’s so much opportunity there, it should actually be getting more attention. Crowley agreed on location-based services (of course!), and when pushed by Swisher to name something else he said “presence.”
“That’s location!” Swisher chided. “Yes but I said something else,” Crowley teased back.
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Yahoo’s Bartz: ‘I’m here to stay. Do I look like a wimp?’
Oct 21st
One day after Yahoo reported its Q3 earnings and Yahoo’s board unofficially committed to stick with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz for the remainder of her contract, Bartz was interviewed by Fox Business.
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Yahoo’s Shashi Seth Calls comScore Data Misleading, Blames Google Instant
Oct 13th
In a blog post yesterday, Shashi Seth, Sr. VP, Yahoo Search & Marketplaces called the latest comScore results, which showed Google’s search market share increase and Yahoo’s dip, misleading. He said the increase was likely due to people who…well, type too slowly using Google Instant.
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