Yahoo: A Portion of Its Fantastical Search History
April 15, 2015
I have a view of Yahoo. Sure, it was formed when I was part of the team that developed The Point (Top 5% of the Internet). Yahoo had a directory. We had a content processing system. We spoke with Yahoo’s David Filo. Yahoo had a vision, he said. We said, No problem.
The Point became part of Lycos, embracing Fuzzy and his round ball chair. Yahoo, well, Yahoo just got bigger and generally went the way of general purpose portals. CEOs came and went. Stakeholders howled and then sulked.
I read or rather looked at “Yahoo. Semantic Search From Document Retrieval to Virtual Assistants.” You can find the PowerPoint “essay” or “revisionist report” on SlideShare. The deck was assembled by the director of research at Yahoo Labs. I don’t think this outfit is into balloons, self driving automobiles, and dealing with complainers at the European Commission. Here’s the link. Keep in mind you may have to sign up with the LinkedIn service in order to do anything nifty with the content.
The premise of the slide deck is that Yahoo is into semantic search. After some stumbles, semantic search started to become a big deal with Google and rich snippets, Bing and its tiles, and Facebook with its Like button and the magical Open Graph Protocol. The OGP has some fascinating uses. My book CyberOSINT can illuminate some of these uses.
And where is Yahoo in the 2008 to 2010 interval when semantic search was abloom? Patience, grasshopper.
Yahoo was chugging along with its Knowledge Graph. If this does not ring a bell, here’s the illustration used in the deck:
The date is 2013, so Yahoo has been busy since Facebook, Google, and Microsoft were semanticizing their worlds. Yahoo has a process in place. Again from the slide deck:
I was reminded of the diagrams created by other search vendors. These particular diagrams echo the descriptions of the now defunct Siderean Software server’s set up. But most content processing systems are more alike than different.
I know the patent writers and the researchers are able to point out significant differences, but when I flip through the plumbing diagrams, I see a certain homogeneity. Search has not progressed that much in the last five or six years. What’s changed is the terminology used to describe what the systems purport to deliver to customers, licensees, and users.
I was reassured when Yahoo mentioned “understanding” user queries. Understanding is a pretty difficult challenge. Some companies use marketing words; others use fancy math; and others use linguistics. Then there are companies that, by golly, use every possible method in an effort to understand the meaning of a one word WhatsApp message before a bad actor performs a task that harms people. I know. One word. How annoying when a company is understanding human queries and discourse. Just toss out the problematic content and focus on the nice, well formed, carefully tagged, unambiguous content. (Well, even that content is tough to crack and we are not including rich media, grasshopper.)
Yahoo is going to roll out new applications using its semantic search technology. I am enjoined to think mobile. I will be engaged in question answering via my mobile device. I will engage in conversational voice search with my trusty mobile phone. I will be able to complete tasks.
I am excited, but I am realistic. Search remains difficult whether swathed in the jargon of cognitive search or the Watson-like efflorescences from IBM.
Perhaps IBM and Yahoo should team up. I recall the Yahoo IBM search system. Now that was a product that followed what I call the Yahoo highway. I think the computer I used to test the software is still indexing the test corpus I provided six or eight years ago.
There is that challenge of throughput. The more fancy tricks a content processing performs, the need for computing resources goes up. Perhaps the Yahoo semantic system breaks through these cost/time/performance barriers when I talk to my mobile device speeding along the dirt roads in Harrod’s Creek in my noisy Kia Soul? Yahoo has nailed the ambient noise and interface issues, right?
Stephen E Arnold, April 15, 2015
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