Yahoo seeks to make its Web search more predictive

Yahoo Inc is making Web search faster by introducing new ways of predicting what users are looking for, while seeking to keep pace with rivals by including video, audio and picture results as answers to text searches.

The company said the new features it announced on Monday were aimed at better understanding the intention of users conducting particular types of searches and to get them to the information they desire within a single search.

Yahoo said it was trying to combat what it calls “Web search fatigue.” Research conducted by Harris Interactive for Yahoo found that roughly 15 per cent of online adults find what want on their first search while most need three to four searches.

Yahoo is seeking to stem the steady gains Google, the dominant supplier of Web search, has made in market share for most of the past two years. Market research firm ComScore said Google’s share grew to 56.5 percent of the U.S. Web search market in August, up 1.3 percent from July.

Yahoo Search Assist suggests related concepts to instantly refine a search, drawing on the wealth of information Yahoo has about what users across its sites are saying when they comment upon Web links, photos, video or the like.

Search Assist is designed to be especially helpful when a person is searching for information on an unfamiliar topic. The feature senses when a searcher needs help with a search and it appears as a drop-down menu under the main search results box.

For example, a user seeking information on British Prime Minister Gordon Brown might see suggestions about Gordon Brown and Scotland, Gordon Brown and budget or Gordon Brown and Iraq.

In addition to the new Search Assist feature, Yahoo Search has also combined searching for links to video, audio and photos with traditional text links it has long offered.

Google Inc, IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Ask.com and Microsoft Corp introduced similar features earlier this year on their rival search services.

Yahoo is tapping the millions of tags users contribute on its properties such as photo-sharing site Flickr to improve the relevance of its general search service.

The company is looking to take advantage of sites it has acquired in recent years including Flickr, bookmark categorization site Del.icio.us and the internally created Yahoo Answers to enhance Yahoo’s general search.

“We hope the data in those Web sites will help make Web search better,” Vish Makhijani, general manager and senior vice president of Yahoo! Search, said in an interview.

A third feature Yahoo is introducing is Search Shortcuts which are designed to help consumers save time when searching for popular categories such as events, music, movies, travel, sports, health, shopping, businesses and restaurants.

Yahoo Search Shortcuts weave in ratings and reviews, photos, official Web sites and other potentially useful information to augment a consumer’s search on these topics.

Yahoo to start testing Mash, a social network site

Yahoo Inc. is testing an experimental social network service called Mash that makes it easy for Yahoo users to share tidbits of their lives with friends and family online, the company said on Sunday.

Mash, to which a limited number of public users began being invited as testers on Friday, was described by a spokeswoman as a new, next-generation service that is independent from the company’s 2- year-old Yahoo 360 degree profile service.

While Yahoo was early among Internet companies to embrace the trend toward sharing media with friends by purchasing start-ups like photo site Flickr.com, it has struggled to catch up with the Web’s biggest new trend: Social networking.

Mash amounts to a new stab at competing with the likes of News Corp’s MySpace, Facebook, Bebo or Google’s Orkut, which have attracted tens of millions of users worldwide.

The Silicon Valley company emphasized it is in the early stages of testing the new service. One aspect of the service is the power it gives users to edit their friends profiles and add personal blurbs, subject to approval by the profile owner.

“Ongoing product innovation is important to Yahoo and we continue to test various products and services to gain feedback from our users. Mash, an experimental profile service, is an example of this ongoing testing,” a company statement said.

Eventually, Mash could connect to a variety of existing Yahoo services and mini-applications known as Widgets, acting as a personal profile both on the public Internet or among a private group of friends, depending on individual preference. Yahoo has more than 500 million monthly users of its various services including a quarter million Yahoo Mail e-mail users.

Separately, Yahoo said on Friday it had acquired for undisclosed terms a company called BuzzTracker.com.

The two-year-old start-up is an online news service that monitors 110,000 different sources — both traditional media and blogs — to identify hot topics.

On its site, BuzzTracker promises to offer users a way to create customized news feeds around a limitless number of topics of their own choosing. It gives Yahoo an alternative to rival Google News, which aggregates together news on various topics from a variety of conventional media sources.

The company’s Chief Executive Alan Warms will run Yahoo News as its general manager, according to Warms blog.

Yahoo tests new services - MapMixer and Shop by Color

Yahoo Inc has begun publicly testing two Web services that are the fruit of intensive, one-day internal programming competitions the company has been hosting to foster employee innovation.

One of them, MapMixer, will let users take the millions of maps on the Web and overlay them onto the same locations on Yahoo Maps — creating hybrid maps that work independently of the underlying format or structure of the different maps.

While certain spots can be denoted on maps from Yahoo and rivals Google Inc, Microsoft Corp, Ask.com and AOL, MapMixer gives non-technical users a way to merge a map of a college campus or a group of local landmarks or a historical map of a town with a Yahoo road or satellite map.

MapMixer was a winner in a product design competition held at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, California headquarters in March.

“I get most of my best ideas either while I am showering or just before I go to sleep,” said MapMixer’s creator, Nimit Maru, an engineer who normally works in Yahoo’s travel business. “This is one of those showering ideas.”

“Hack Days” are 24-hour day-and-night competitions that seek to break down barriers between product groups within the organization in order to build rapid prototypes of workable Web services that the company can in turn commercialize.

The events have been held quarterly since late 2005 at Yahoo offices around the world, from its Silicon Valley headquarters to London, New York and Bangalore, the Yahoo manager in charge of spearheading the exercises said.

“‘Hack Days’ are about expressions of creativity,” Bradley Horowitz, vice president of Yahoo’s Advanced Development Division, said in a phone interview. “I want people to do really wild, speculative stuff.”

MapMixer is now being publicly tested and can be found on a link off Yahoo Maps or at http://maps.yahoo.com/mapmixer/. Once on the MapMixer page, users can upload a map in a variety of image formats, including popular types such as .jpeg or .gif.

Once a map is uploaded, a user can meld it with any Yahoo map. After locating it on the Yahoo Map grid, MapMixer places the uploaded map and rotates and scales it, calculating how to make the maps work together on different computers, Maru said.

The program then snaps the two together to create a hybrid map that can be saved for personal use in a My Maps account.

“It started out with the idea first,” said Maru, 24, a graduate of the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. “The technology came later.” To turn MapMixer into a product, the engineer was given time off from his normal duties in Yahoo Travel to collaborate with employees in the Yahoo Maps team.

A second application Yahoo is introducing is “Shop by Color,” a feature to make it easier to search by color for products on its shopping site. It was created by Yahoo Shopping employees Hayro Kolukisaoglu and Sundeep Tirumalareddy.

Online shoppers will be able to filter their search for items such as shoes or pants by selecting from 56 color hues.

Selecting specific hues will filter searches to locate any similar results, regardless of the color name used by a product maker, be it tangerine or orange, charcoal or slate gray.

Other hacks that have evolved into products include Yahoo Messenger Flight Planner, a plug-in software program that allows users to use the company’s instant communications program to simultaneously plan trips, officials said.

Yahoo! to stream web-only US Prez debate

Not to be outdone by Google and YouTube, Yahoo! will soon host the first web-only U.S. presidential debate.

Also set for the sites of co-sponsors Slate and The Huffington Post, the September 12 streaming-video event will feature all eight Democratic presidential candidates, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, The Washington Post reports.

As with the recent CNN/YouTube debate, which aired on nationwide cable television, this debate will allow tech-happy voters to submit video questions via the web. But in contrast to the CNN/YouTube face-off, the Yahoo! event will only be broadcast online, additional questions will be taken in real-time, and everyone will be spared Anderson Cooper. Hosting duties will be handled by PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose.

The Post, whose parent company owns Slate, also says that viewers will have the ability slice and dice the online broadcast. They can choose to watch nothing but Hillary Clinton, for instance, or filter out everything but questions on Iraq. It’s unclear if this can be done in real-time at time of the initial broadcast. Yahoo!, Slate, and The Huffington Post did not immediately respond to requests for clarification.

The debate comes at a time when Yahoo! is working overtime to make up lost ground to Google and YouTube in the web video race. Bloomberg reports that by the end of year, the company will completely revamp its video offerings, adding music videos, movie trailers, television shows, and sports highlights as well as content created by internet users.

“One of our strategies is to put video everywhere you are on the Internet,” said Mike Folgner, Yahoo’s general manager for video. “We’re going to build a much better destination for you to access all this different content.”

According to Folgner, record companies including Universal Music Group and the EMI Group will provide music videos, the Associated Press and CNN will fork over news clips, and sports highlights will arrive from the National Football League and Major League Baseball.

This past May, according to research firm comScore, three out of every four American internet users streamed video from the web, viewing 8.3bn separate streams, and 21.5 per cent of those streams were served up by Google. Yahoo! accounted for 4.6 per cent.

Yahoo beefs up target advertising tools with SmartAds

Internet media company Yahoo Inc. will offer its marketing clients tools to create more personalized advertisements to Web users as it strives to build its share of graphical display advertising.

Yahoo is due to unveil on Monday a new system dubbed SmartAds that allows advertisers to compile ads on the spot based on a Web user’s Internet profile, including such data as their location, recent product searches and, in some cases, age or household income.

“It starts to marry the concept of targeting … with the construction of the ad,” Todd Teresi, Yahoo’s senior vice president of display marketplaces, told Reuters.

The aim, he said, is for “consumers to view advertising to be as relevant as the content they’re looking at.”

Internet advertising companies have built up technologies to better identify consumers visiting specific Web sites and serve them ads that directly relate to what they may want to purchase.

One such method is behavioral targeting, which tracks the sites a user has visited online and suggests products to them based on their stated interests.

The market for such targeted ads is expected to nearly double to $1 billion in 2008 from this year, and surge to $3.8 billion by 2011, according to research firm eMarketer.

SmartAds takes such targeting methods a step further, allowing advertising agencies to create a template for ads with several variables, then compile those elements on the spot to suit a specific reader.

For example, a Web user who has shown an interest in certain car models and who logged on from a computer in Los Angeles could receive an ad for that vehicle that combines information on their nearest dealership and a real-time feed of inventory levels, Teresi said.

Yahoo’s bigger rival in Web search, Google Inc., also aims to compete for display advertising dollars.

Last week, Yahoo said it would merge its display and Web search advertising businesses to address client requests for campaigns that combine both types of ads.

Yahoo will start to roll out the SmartAds system for travel-related clients, beginning with two leading airlines. The company aims to offer the system to up to four different advertising segments by the end of the year.

SmartAds will operate on Yahoo’s network of Web sites as well as in its advertising partnerships with eBay Inc., major U.S. newspaper publishers and cable operator Comcast Corp.