Progress Report: Continued Product Focus by Jay Rossiter, SVP, Cloud Platform Group.
From the post:
At Yahoo, focus is an important part of accomplishing our mission: to make the world’s daily habits more entertaining and inspiring. To achieve this focus, we have sunset more than 60 products and services over the past two years, and redirected those resources toward products that our users care most about and are aligned with our vision. With even more smart, innovative Yahoos focused on our core products – search, communications, digital magazines, and video – we can deliver the best for our users.
…
Directory: Yahoo was started nearly 20 years ago as a directory of websites that helped users explore the Internet. While we are still committed to connecting users with the information they’re passionate about, our business has evolved and at the end of 2014 (December 31), we will retire the Yahoo Directory. Advertisers will be upgraded to a new service; more details to be communicated directly.
Understandable but sad. Think of indexing a book that expanded as rapidly as the Internet over the last twenty (20) years. Especially if the content might or might not have any resemblance to already existing content.
Internet remains in serious need of a curated means to access quality information. Almost any search returns links ranging from high to questionable quality.
Imagine if Yahoo segregated the top 500 computer science publishers, archives, societies, departments, blogs into a block of searchable content. (The 500 number is wholly arbitrary, could be some other number) Users would pre-qualify themselves as interested in computer science materials and create a market segment for advertising purposes.
Users would get less trash in their results and advertisers would have pre-qualified targets.
A pre-curated search set might mean you would miss an important link, but realistically, few people read beyond the first twenty (20) links anyway. An analysis of search logs at PubMed show that 80% of users choose a link from the first twenty results.
In theory you may have > 10,000 “hits” but querying all of those up for serving to a user is a waste to time.
Suspect it varies by domain but twenty (20) high quality “hits” from curated content would be a far cry from average search results now.
I first saw this in Greg Linden’s Quick Links for Wednesday, October 01, 2014.