Yahoo Announces Yahoo Labs

I knew you knew about Google Labs, but did you know about Yahoo Labs? Yahoo on Monday announced Yahoo Research Labs at http://labs.yahoo.com , describing it as " a research organization focused on inventing new technologies and solutions relevant to strategic Yahoo! businesses. The group will pursue a portfolio of topics that include pay for performance search, web search, vertical businesses and platform technologies." (You can see the whole press release at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/040119/195140_1.html .)

The Web site is made up of a series of tabs, some with headings that would do Tom Peters proud ("Invention, disruption, innovation, improvement"). I found the most interesting stuff over in Research. There are three projects currently available for noodling: Open Source Search, Cluster Graphing, and Concept Discovery.

Open Source Search uses a live version of Nutch. Interestingly enough searching for Google generated an error, while saerching for Yahoo found over 11,000 results. Each search result has the title and a snippet, and three links: Cached, explain, and anchors. Cached shows a cached page (sans date), explain shows you a lot of information about the weight of the document (I didn't really understand this) and Anchors shows incoming anchor text. (All the anchor pages I looked at showed multiple instances of the same anchor text.)

Cluster Graphing shows graphic representation of search terms in their relation to each other (coveredin RB last September: http://www.researchbuzz.com/archives/000012.shtml ) and popular search terms among searchers (also covered last September; this incarnation allows you to search for these terms on Overture, AlltheWeb, Yahoo News, and Yahoo TV.)

I'm glad Yahoo is offering something like this. However, it's lacking. The first thing it lacks is some kind of API or at least guidelines on how programmers might use Yahoo data (since Yahoo is a searchable subject index, and is divided into categories, you could do some really fun stuff with the search data.) There needs to be more communication between Yahoo users and Yahoo. I had a question about AltaVista news last week, and the only communication tool I could find at AltaVista was an online form. (I used it but nobody at AltaVista ever responded.) And Yahoo needs to have some kind of intention about what they're going to do for search -- not just following Google but striking off in their own direction. What can THEY do to make search better for Yahoo, Yahoo's content, and Yahoo's users?

I know little about Yahoo's corporate structure. I am feeling heartened, however, about the fact that Yahoo is doing so much with RSS feeds, and about the fact that Jeremy Zawodny and Ernie Hsiung are working there. (Not so much that they are there -- I know they're just two guys -- but that they're there and they seem happy to be there and enthused about what's going on.)

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