Yahoo BOSS: Not with Much Authority
October 11, 2008
I have been identifying technical challenges for Yahoo for a number of years. The core of my concern is that Yahoo has collected search systems the way my mother hoarded figurines. To recap: Yahoo had a primitive search system for its directory (now long gone) then Yahoo bought Inktomi then Yahoo bought Overture and got Overture’s home grown search system and AltaVista.com then Yahoo bought AllTheWeb.com from Fast Search & Transfer then Yahoo licensed InQuira for customer support then Yahoo bought Stata Labs then Yahoo cut a deal with X1 for desktop search then Yahoo divorced X1 and married IBM OmniFind (Lucene) then Yahoo bought Flickr and got its search system then Yahoo bought Delicious.com recoded it and its search system (a two year project) and … now I’m tired. I don’t think I have these in chronological order. I skipped Yahoo Mindset and the semantic search system and probably two or three other systems.
Why is this a big deal? Cost. If an engineer knows something about Stata Labs and the Overture team needs some help, the skills are not transferable across heterogeneous systems.
The article about Yahoo BOSS that triggers my creating a variant of Homer’s list of ships in the Iliad is an article by Stephen Shankland, which is quite good. His story “Academics Sink Teeth into Yahoo Search Service” here. Mr. Shankland reviews the purpose of BOSS, a play by Yahoo to get more traction for the company’s Web search service. With some clever people building on the Yahoo index, Yahoo hopes to pump up its ad revenues. The twist in the lariat, however, is that Google has a Web search market share of 65 percent, maybe higher depending on which research firms’ data one choose to consult. Also, Yahoo has fumbled a deal with Microsoft. With its shares below $15, Yahoo doesn’t command much authority in Web search, with investors, or with me. Mr. Shankland notes that academics are liking the Yahoo BOSS service.
For me, the most interesting comment was this one:
“We’re not a market leader,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo Search. “From a strategic standpoint, it does make sense to let other people innovate on top of us. If the pie grows, our share of the pie grows at the expense of somebody else.”
Baloney. By the time the pie grows, Google will have eaten more. Google is growing at Yahoo’s, Microsoft’s, and Ask.com’s expense. Even with the crash this week, the GOOG continues to chomp away at other vendors’ market share.
Let me capture my thoughts about the choral singing of Kumbaya by Yahoo and wizards-in-training from a number of prestigious academic institutions:
- Costs. Yahoo is going to have to find a way to create a more homogeneous approach to search. If one of these wizards-in-training hits a home run, Yahoo is going to need a way to scale which means money. With heterogeneous search systems, something’s got to give. That “something” will be cost control.
- Time. Time is running out. Yahoo has made minimal progress in its Web traffic race with Google. Instead of focusing, Yahoo has fiddled as its market share has burned. Yahoo has its own Nero, and I’m not sure how much longer the head Yahoo is going to be left in power.
- Google. Cutting a deal with Google seemed like a great way to get out of the Microsoft deal. Now the Google deal is not a reality, and if it is or it isn’t, Yahoo is too far gone to be a threat. The company will become a GM to Google’s Toyota. If the last six months suggest Yahoo’s strategic strength, Yahoo is going to be Studebaker.
In short, Yahoo has got to do more than BOSS (a name that suggests control and superiority) to convince me that it has much of a future. In fact, when I hear boss I think of deboss, a word that denotes stamping a hole into a surface.
Stephen Arnold, October 11, 2008
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2 Responses to “Yahoo BOSS: Not with Much Authority”
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Stephen, you may be interested in this Yahoo BOSS based service PopGist (http://www.popgist.com) which is innovative ranking and presentation of the search results.
PopGist
Thanks for the information.
Stephen Arnold, October 11, 2008