Yahoo: Missing the Obvious
December 11, 2008
Web Pro News here has a very interesting discussion of Yahoo’s BOSS search service. Chris Crum’s “How Much Demand Is There for Open Search?” answer this question with the statement, “A Lot According to Yahoo”. You must read this article. First, it provides links to Yahoo’s explanation of BOSS. I can never remember what the letters mean, and I don’t have a compelling need to stress my addled goose brain. I can navigate to Google, enter BOSS, and click on the Google link to the service which is number five in the results list today (December 8, 2008). Run the same query on Yahoo and the direct link is the number two result. My thought, “Why not boost BOSS so it is number one and in one of the ads on the page. Nope, not Yahoo. Second, the story shows an impressive graph with BOSS daily queries running at 10 million per day. That’s a lot of monetizable traffic. Nope, Yahoo did not engineer the system to count the clicks. Here’s the quote in Mr. Crum’s story from Yahoo’s BOSS team member Bill Michels:
“Michels is also “quick to point out that, “because these queries are delivered via the BOSS API and served up by our partners, they aren’t counted as Yahoo! Search queries by comScore or other metrics providers.”
My thought is that Yahoo figured out part of the problem. There are tricky Google style methods to track these clicks, and there are even simpler methods in use. AC Nielsen has patents on a couple of angles that could serve as inspiration to Yahoo. Finally, Mr. Crum is willing to give Yahoo the benefit of the doubt, which I find admirable. He wrote:
I think time will tell how much demand there really is for open search, and how much (and if) Yahoo’s new strategies really cut into Google’s percentage of the search market share. It is refreshing to see some new and different things happening with Yahoo and search in general, regardless.
My take on this is that Yahoo is in a rush to demonstrate that it can not only run with the big dog but take a bite out of its tail zone. Yahoo is going to have to find a way to monetize its traffic. My addled goose brain recalls that Yahoo was slow to monetize Flickr after its purchase by Yahoo. Delicious was recoded over a period of two years and not effectively monetized. But with so many bright people and such an imperative to make money, I think Yahoo has need of some different thinking.
For Yahoo, I think the gap between it and Google may now be too great to bridge. Yahoo needs more services that generate 10 million queries a day. Monetization may need to become a priority and quickly.
Stephen Arnold, December 12, 2008
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One Response to “Yahoo: Missing the Obvious”
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To your first point about BOSS not being advertised on Google — sounds like they are dong okay there — you found BOSS and they didn’t spend a penny. 🙂
But I, too, wonder how all that BOSS traffic (read: cost) is going to be turned into revenue. What do you think Yahoo will do to turn those millions of queries per day into dollars?