Search in the Bartz Era at Yahoo
January 16, 2009
The Beyond Search geese have been honking speculatively today about Yahoo search in the post-floundering era. We decided that it was a miracle that Yahoo has been able to keep its revenues where they are and maintain a 20 percent share of the Web search market. Several of the Beyond Search goslings use Yahoo for mail, photo browsing, and bookmark surfing. Others don’t think too much of Yahoo for various reasons. These range from lousy performance over some wireless services to features that seem clunky compared to alternatives available from other vendors.
We read closely Rebecca Buckman’s “The Exacting Standars of Carol Bartz” and found the Forbes article interesting. You can read it here. Unlike some of the critical articles about Carol Bartz, Ms. Buckman focuses on her accomplishments. One interesting parallel is that the “freewheeling culture” of Autodesk and the wild and crazy approach at Yahoo may share some similarities. Ms. Bartz made staff changes and “professinalized” some departments. Yahoo may benefit from this type of management.
Our Beyond Search discussion focused on search, specifically what we perceive as the “problem” with Yahoo search. In order to make Yahoo search more useful, Yahoo has to find a way to address such shortcomings as the spotty relevancy for Web queries that are not about popular topics. The search available for Yahoo shopping is not very useful. In fact, it is on a par with eBay’s current system, and that is quite disappointing. Even convenience services such as finding currency conversion data becomes an exercise in navigating multiple pages. “Search without search” is something that Yahoo needs to master.
In order to remediate Yahoo search, we think that some serious engineering must be done and completed quickly. At lunch we ran several test queries. For example, one was “enterprise search”. The results were surprising. Here’s the display we saw:
We liked the search suggestions, but we found that the first four results were skewed to Microsoft. For example, there is the Microsoft paid ad in the blue box. That’s the second result. In the organic results, we saw a link to the Yahoo and IBM free search system, which is a boosted result. The Wikipedia result is okay. But the third and fourth results are for Microsoft search pages. The results are not “bad”; the results were just not what we expected. You can run your own queries and see how the Yahoo search results work for you.
A test shopping query was “discount quad core”. The system returned computer sytems from brand name vendors. I thnk each of these systems is tagged with the word “discount”. These are not discount systems, however.
How can these search issues be fixed? Is tweaking enough? Will Yahoo’s many different search initiatives ultimately lead to a system that is “better” than Google’s in the eyes of the users?
Here’s the Beyond Search lunch time view:
- Yahoo has to work on relevance. Google has made a significant investment in technology to determine context and react to what other users find helpful. Yahoo seems to lag in these areas.
- In terms of mobile serarch, the Yahoo system requires menu navigation. Because of the clunkiness of the approach, it is difficult to determine if Yahoo is doing much more than dumping informaton into buckets and showing stories as those stories arrive.
- For shopping, Yahoo gets a user close to a product, but Yahoo makes it difficult to find a specific product. We don’t think eBay or Google have cracked the code on shopping search. Yahoo might be able to leapfrog some of the competitors with an innovative approach.
The problem with addressing all or some of these challenges is that it will take time to come up with a solution that is not a one-off, stand-alone island. Yahoo has not focused on search as part of the core fabric of the company. At Google, search and advertising are tough to separate. At Yahoo, search is one thing. Advertising is another. Yahoo, therefore, must think of ways to integrate so the two functions yield an advantage over Google.
Yahoo has the talent and the funds to address these issues. What Yahoo does not have, we concluded, is time. In fact, time may be Yahoo’s biggest single problem. Floundering can be rectified with time. Without time, Yahoo will remain a shadow of its former self. Even a deal with Microsoft can’t change that.
Meantime, the Google maintains its lead in search and advertising. A decade of search missteps cannot be fixed over night. Ms. Bartz may have the expertise, but does she have the time? We quacked loudly, “We don’t think so.”
Stephen Arnold, January 16, 2009
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
