prodil89 Posted August 13, 2010 Report Share Posted August 13, 2010 (edited) What Happend to Yahoo August 2010 When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be. What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company. Money The first time I met Jerry Yang, we thought we were meeting for different reasons. He thought we were meeting so he could check us out in person before buying us. I thought we were meeting so we could show him our new technology, Revenue Loop. It was a way of sorting shopping search results. Merchants bid a percentage of sales for traffic, but the results were sorted not by the bid but by the bid times the average amount a user would buy. It was like the algorithm Google uses now to sort ads, but this was in the spring of 1998, before Google was founded. Revenue Loop was the optimal sort for shopping search, in the sense that it sorted in order of how much money Yahoo would make from each link. But it wasn't just optimal in that sense. Ranking search results by user behavior also makes search better. Users train the search: you can start out finding matches based on mere textual similarity, and as users buy more stuff the search results get better and better. Jerry didn't seem to care. I was confused. I was showing him technology that extracted the maximum value from search traffic, and he didn't care? I couldn't tell whether I was explaining it badly, or he was just very poker faced. I didn't realize the answer till later, after I went to work at Yahoo. It was neither of my guesses. The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If they merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less. More..... [url=http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html]What Happened to Yahoo[/url] Edited August 13, 2010 by prodil89 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flubber Posted August 13, 2010 Report Share Posted August 13, 2010 Interesant, multumesc.Dar cred ca a uitat sa arate partea care conteaza uneori foarte bine, si anume, nu programatorii buni ci cei hackerii dedicati care adeseori iti rezolva niste gauri IMENSE, care acei programatori buni nu le-ar observa... Dar, banuiesc ca asta se rezuma tot la programatori buni (pentru a rezolva gaurile)... xD Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
