Yahoo to Out Google Google
February 19, 2010
I remember when the kids were young. I had to endure some films with titles like Friday the 13th, Part 2, Friday the 13th, The Final Chapter, Friday the 13th, Part VII, and (my favorite) Jason Goes to Hell, the Final Friday. Well, it wasn’t the final Friday, there was Jason X. When I read about a new search wizard at Yahoo and how Yahoo will become a powerhouse in search, it’s Jason time.
I read “Yahoo! Looks beyond Google’s Data Cruncher” and shivered. It’s back! The article reports without the zing I associate with the Register that Google has a laser dot on its scaly forehead. Googzilla’s data methods are toast. According to the write up:
But for Ron Brachman – the former Bell Labs and DARPA man who now serves as vice president of Yahoo! labs and research – a future interwebs may need something very different. MapReduce splinters compute tasks into tiny pieces that are processed independently of each other, and this sort of parallelism by complete separation, he argues, may be ill-suited to a more nuanced breed of web application. One example is a web that leans heavily on natural language processing. “When we get closer to doing broad-scale language processing that’s more, if you will, semantic, we might need to move away from a MapReduce architecture to something that may be equally parallel but with a very different computational architecture,” Brachman tells The Reg.
On paper, sure. In reality, not so sure. Yahoo is going to enter some sort of speed dating event with Microsoft. Yahoo is losing credibility with me because I have heard promises before. After my BearStearns report about Ramanathan Guha’s semantic inventions, a Yahoo poobah insisted that Yahoo had semantic technology that was going to put Google in a dark room with no candles.
What happened was staff cutting, reorganizing, lower revenues, and the same old search. Shopping search, which was unusable, and remains less useful to me than Bing.com’s approach.
My view. Roll out a service that delivers on point results. The PR buzz causes me to put in ear plugs. Have you ever seen a goose with ear plugs. Very weird. Almost as weird as viewing Google’s data management infrastructure, system, and methods as frozen in time. When you read it in a patent, it is too late in my opinion. Google has moved on when the patent applications are filed.
Stephen E Arnold, February 19, 2010
No one paid me to write this. I will report getting no money to the White House which seems to know everything there is to know about the Google. Well, almost everything.
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