Yahoo: Semantic Search Is the Future
August 16, 2015
I love it when Yahoo explains the future of search. The Xoogler has done the revisionism thing and shifted from Yahoo as a directory built by silly humanoids to a leader in search. Please, do not remember that Yahoo bought Inktomi in 2002 and then rolled out a wild and crazy search system in cahoots with IBM in 2006. (By the way, that search solution brought my IBM multi cpu, DASD equipped, RAM stuffed server to its knees. At least, the “free” software installed.)
Now to business: I read “The Future of Search Relies on Semantic Technologies.” For me, semantic technologies have been part of search for many years. But never mind reality. Let’s get to the Reddi-wip in the Yahoo confection.
Yahoo asserts:
Search companies are thus investing in information extraction and data fusion, as well as more and more advanced question-answering capabilities on top of the collected information. The need for these technologies is only increasing with mobile search, where providing results as ten blue links leads to a very poor user experience.
I would point out that as lousy as blue links are, these links produce about $60 billion a year for the Alphabet Google thing and enough zeros for the Microsoft wizards to hang on to its online advertising business even as it loses enthusiasm for other aspects of the Bing thing.
Yahoo adds:
We are a consumer internet company, so for us there is little difference between our internal and external representations.
My comment is a simple question, “What the heck is Yahoo saying?”
I also highlighted this semantic gem:
At Yahoo Labs, we work in advancing the sciences that underlie these approaches, i.e. Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval and the Semantic Web.
I like the notion of Yahoo advancing science. I wonder if these advances will lead to advances in top line revenue, stabilizing management, and producing search results that are sort of related to the query.
In closing, here are the results from the query “Yahoo semantic search innovations” from Yahoo search:
The first result points to a 2012 item “Smarter Search: Why ‘semantic Search’ Will Finally Let Google Understand You.” Not too useful, Yahoo. I wanted information about Yahoo, not Google. As an aside, Google understands advertising.
The second result is from 2008 with the fetching title “Yahoo Lets You Build Your Own Search Service.” Sorry, the BOSS thing is not what I am after. Boss was supposed to “spur innovation in the search space and disrupt the market.” Well, how did that work out? Also, like the first result, this is not the information I sought.
The third result is this one:
Now that is impressive. Yahoo Labs’ own subsite features a 404 for a query about semantic innovation. Nifty.
A couple of observations:
- Yahoo is a bit lost in marketing and busy drinking the Xoogler’s grape Kool-Aid. The reality is that search available from Yahoo is lousy.
- Yahoo talks but does not deliver innovation. The BOSS thing and the dead link point to words about innovation. The actual search function delivers irrelevant results. So much for semantics.
- Yahoo engineers struggle to generate products and services which grow revenue. The company cannot deal with 404s to queries about the subject of my query, which is the focus of the curve ball write up.
So much for attention to detail and relevant search results.
Stephen E Arnold, August 16, 2015
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One Response to “Yahoo: Semantic Search Is the Future”
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Well check out this 15 year look back at Semantic Search: http://j.mp/15yrsSS