ResearchBuzz

I have been stumping around for the last couple of days very upset about the idea of Yahoo/Microsoft, but then I sat down, calmed down, and realized that such an arrangement would have some advantages. I was only able to think of nine, but they were there.

The Nine Good Things Happening From Microsoft/Yahoo Merger

9. Bill Gates tapped as new Yahoo yodeling guy.

8. Flickr starts MS Bob photo pool.

7. 404 error pages at Yahoo.com replaced with adorable blue screens.

6. After acquisition, Yahoo realizes its stumbles with multimedia properties are due to lack of focus. The next multimedia service is called Yahoo! Monkey Sounds.

5. In addition to standard intitle: and inurl: syntax, Yahoo’s search engine adds webserveros:.

4. Ironically, everybody thinks “Vista del.icio.us” is a kind of apple.

3. Yahoo Pipes adds new module — “Spin”.

2. Easter Egg on Yahoo! Maps allows you to play a Where’s Waldo-like game called Where’s Paul Allen.

1. Still woozy from the smell of all that cashola, Yahoo’s shareholders accidentally appoint Clippy as Yahoo’s Transition CEO. (”I see you’re trying to turn a company around…”)

Appalled.

Appalled and horrified. Worried. Scared.

Did I say appalled?

Unless you’ve been under a particularly tightly-sealed rock, you heard that this morning Microsoft offered over $44 billion to purchase Yahoo. That’s a considerable premium under recent closing prices. And Microsoft made the offer public, taking it straight to the shareholders.

That’s about the least auspicious beginning I can think of. Microsoft has talked to Yahoo before and got nowhere, so it tried again by appealing directly to the shareholders with a truck load — ten truckloads — a STADIUMLOAD — of money. There’s a lot of muh-muh-muh in the discussion about common goals and Google and putting resources together, but Microsoft is getting this done by hitting the greed button.

Which feels disrespectful to me. To the board, to Jerry Yang, to the whole company.

Microsoft is quoted several places as saying, “Together, Microsoft and Yahoo can offer competitive choice…” No. Microsoft could have offered competitive choice. Yahoo could have offered competitive choice. They didn’t because of the choices that they made and the things they decided to emphasize. Is tying them together going to make things better? No. In fact, it might make them worse if some truly great things that Yahoo is doing (Flickr’s Commons project, Yahoo Pipes, all the API work) and throws them out in favor of ramming LiveYahoo or YaSearch (or whatever it ends up being called) down our snorkels.

As a searcher, I have used but am not fond of Live Search. I got really disgusted with it last March after Microsoft turned off some special syntax functionality due to scrapers. Isn’t there some other option? Create an API with key? CAPTCHA? Something??? I sympathize if the syntax is being misused, but is the answer really to TURN IT OFF for the rest of us?

I use Yahoo too, and its search is okay — Yahoo News is lovely. Unfortunately what started as the core of Yahoo — the Yahoo Directory — is beyond bad. It’s out of date. With the Open Directory Project as moribund as it is, that means there’s no useful searchable subject index out there. And Yahoo has del.icio.us! They have jillions of people adding bookmarks to that thing constantly! Can’t that be at least a way to keep the directory updated?

I feel awful about this tieup. I’m going to have to go think about it some more. I’ll probably still hate it but at least I’ll be able to articulate it better.

Oh, such coolness — the Library of Congress recently announced that it’s teaming up with Flickr. According to the LOC blog post, “If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata…”

(Flickr is actually working on a project to get the world generating metadata for publicly-held photograph collections — see The Commons at http://www.flickr.com/commons .)

The idea is that the Library of Congress now has its own Flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/ . Photos are being posted there for users to tag, comment about, and provide more information on. Though there are literally millions of photos/prints/visual things in the LOC’s collections, the LOC page has launched with over 3,000 items.

The photographs cover a lot of ground but the LOC does have two sets of photos available — 1930s-1940s in Color and News in the 1910s. Just browsing through all the photographs finds all kinds of topics, from smokestacks to medals to cowboys to baseball players.

I was amazed at how many people have commented on these photographs. And get a load of the tag clouds. “Vintage”, as you might imagine, is a very popular tag.

If you want to search Flickr for just LOC content, you can use the search form at http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=&w=8623220%40N02 . I tried to use Yahoo Images to search the images by other parameters (like size,whether the image is in color or not, etc.) but I couldn’t figure out how to limit Yahoo Images results to a particular Flickr user.