My Yahoo will add implicit personalization

Richard MacManus reports that a major revision of My Yahoo is about to start a private beta test.

Richard has already seen the beta and says that the features include a "pre-built personalized page for each user, based on data Yahoo has already gleaned from their usage of Yahoo properties."

In other words, My Yahoo will learn from your usage of Yahoo and builds you your own personalized page.

New implicit personalization features may not be limited to My Yahoo. Verne Kopytoff at SFGate reports that "Jerry Yang, the Sunnyvale company's co-founder, spoke [recently] about better tailoring Yahoo's iconic Web portal to individual users, with the help of technology that predicts what they want."

It appears that both My Yahoo and the Yahoo home page may soon adapt to your behavior and try to learn what you might want.

See also my May 2006 post, "Yahoo home page cries out for personalization", where I said, "To help me get where I want to go, the [Yahoo home] page should feature things I use at Yahoo. To help me discover new stuff, the site should recommend things based on what I already use."

I suppose I could also point to a bunch of past posts about the work on Findory over the last three years, but maybe just "Starting Findory: In the beginning" will do.

[Read/WriteWeb and SFGate articles found via Search Engine Land]

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Chris Payne leaves MSN Search

Todd Bishop reports in the Seattle PI that Chris Payne, "the Microsoft Corp. executive who led the company's challenge to Google is leaving the company."

Four years ago, back in Feb 2003, Chris Payne pitched Bill Gates on building a Google-killer. That became Project Underdog and lead to a long, expensive, and largely unsuccessful effort to compete with Google.

See also Todd's weblog post which adds additional commentary and pointers to other coverage.

See also my Nov 2006 post, "Google dominates, MSN Search sinks".

Update: Danny Sullivan posts an excellent, detailed article on the history of Microsoft and search, writing that Microsoft now is entering its "third era" of search "because there are no longer any excuses to justify further losses."

I would recommend jumping down to Danny's subheading "2003: The 'Build Our Own' Decision & Christopher Payne" and reading down in the article from there.

Update: Danny Sullivan posts more details about how Microsoft created the opportunity for the rise of Google back in 1998-2002 using comments directly from "former Microsoft search chief" Bill Bliss. An obviously frustrated Bill writes, "I was always told 'Search is not core to our business ... AOL is the competitor to beat.'"

Update: Three weeks later, BusinessWeek writes "Where is Microsoft Search?", saying that "In February, 2005, Microsoft's MSN Search accounted for nearly 14% of all Web searches ... Just two years later, Microsoft's rebranded Windows Live Search has a 9.6% share" and that "Microsoft has already squandered much of the time it spent developing the search business .... [while] Google has performed near flawlessly."

Update: Eight months later, Microsoft Search GM Ken Moss -- Chris' right hand man on the search effort for the last five years -- is out too.

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The Google Phone

An interesting rumor from Elinor Mills at News.com:

Simeon Simeonov of Polaris Venture Partners writes ... that [Google Phone] will be a Blackberry-like device ... [that will] offer voice over Internet Protocol.

"Apparently, Google is planning to build distribution relationships with multiple carriers by allowing them to minimize subscription and marketing costs," Simeonov writes. "In other words, Google will market the phone online and carriers will fulfill. How fast can you say dumb pipe?"

See also my August 2005 post, " Google Talk and VoIP over WiFi", where I said:

What if I had a phone that works over WiFi? ... What if there was city-wide WiFi coverage? Or WiFi coverage equivalent to cell phone networks (covering cities and major highways)? [Then] my WiFi phone would work everywhere.

Google just launched Google Talk, a VoIP application. Google is rumored to be thinking about a nationwide free WiFi network. Combined these two, add a WiFi phone to the mix, and am I about to get free mobile calling nationwide?

See also my August 2006 follow-up post, "More on Google and VoIP using WiFi".

Update: Six weeks later, Danny Sullivan posts a good timeline and summary of rumors and information about the Google Phone.

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Matt Cutts interview on personalized search

Gord Hotchkiss at Search Engine Land posted another interview (partial with comments, full transcript) on personalized search, this one with Googler Matt Cutts.

Some selected excerpts:

Personalization is one of those things where if you look down the road a few years, having a search engine that is willing to give you better results because it can know a little bit more about what your interests are, that's a clear win for users.

Already, you don't do a search for football and get the same results in the U.K. as you do in the U.S .... You can get different results, instead of just the standard American results ... [That has] a huge benefit.

If you're in the United Kingdom and you type the query newspapers, you don't want to get, necessarily, the L.A. Times or a local paper in Seattle, the Post-Intelligencer ... [Localization] started down that trend, and, over time, personalization will help a lot of people realize that it's not just a generic set of results, or a vanilla set of results.

The idea of a monolithic set of search results for a generic term will probably start to fade away ... You already see people expect that if I do a search and somebody else does the search, they can get slightly different answers ... Over time people will expect that more and more.

See also my previous post, "Marissa Mayer interview on personalized search", that has selected excerpts from Gord's interview with Google VP Marissa Mayer and references to other information on Google's efforts on personalized search.

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Autogenerated content for the Google Personalized Home Page

Kai Shih has the post on the Official Google Blog about a cute new feature that will autogenerate content for new tabs on the Google Personalized Home Page.

For example, I named a new tab "geek" and got a page with articles from Slashdot, Wired, PCWorld, PC Magazine, Engadget, MajorGeeks, and HowStuffWorks. A tab named "search" had searches for YouTube, eBay, WhitePages, YellowPages, Wikipedia, and Dictionary.com.

Compound queries do not seem to work as well. "Computer science" yields a page with matches for "computer" like PCWorld and PC Magazine and matches for "science" like ScienceDaily, Scientific American, and New Scientist. None of that was the hard core computer science stuff I was expecting.

Obscure stuff does not work at all. For example, requests for autogenerated pages for "cryptography", "mysql", or "findory" returned empty pages.

Nathan Weinberg at Inside Google, who talked with Google personalization lead Sep Kamvar before writing his excellent review, reports, "The system relies on many factors, primarily other people who have named their tabs the same way you've named yours, sees what Gadgets are popular in that set, and gives you a page of them."

The next step, I would assume, would be to try to generate a tab or, more boldly, the initial version of the personalized home page using the information in your search history. That would be very cool, like My Yahoo or Netvibes but with no effort to set up and configure.

See also Philipp Lenssen's review at Google Blogoscoped.

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Buying votes on Digg

Annalee Newitz at Wired writes "I Bought Votes on Digg", an article about how she bought votes to get "a pointless blog full of poorly written, incoherent commentary ... to the front page on Digg."

Matt Marshall has a nice summary of the Wired article, ending with the comment, "This is particular harmful for Digg, because its management has said gaming can't happen."

Security guru Ed Felten posts some good thoughts on the Wired article and, more generally, on manipulation of community reputation systems. Some excerpts:

There's a myth floating around that such [reputation] systems distill an uncannily accurate folk judgment from the votes submitted by millions of ordinary citizens. The wisdom of crowds, and all that.

In fact, reputation systems are fraught with problems, and the most important systems survive because companies expend great effort to supplement the algorithms by investigating abuse and trying to compensate for it.

The incentive problem is especially challenging for recommendation services like Digg. Digg assumes that users will cast votes for the sites they like. If I vote for sites that I really do like, this will mostly benefit strangers.

But if I sell my votes or cast them for sites run by my friends and me, I will benefit more directly. In short, my incentive is to cheat. These sorts of problems seem likely to get worse as a service grows, because the stakes will grow and the sense of community may weaken.

See also my earlier post, "Spam is ruining Digg", and its many references to other posts about spam, Digg, and reputation systems.

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Singing your engineers away

After hearing that Yahoo is going to feature a "journalist-cum-crooner who will sing the news", Rich Skrenta slams Yahoo:

Yahoo has truly lost its way and needs to fix it right now.

Serious Yahoo engineers -- quit before further damage is done to your resumes.

I will hire you. Google will hire you. Someone will hire you. You will be happier in an org that values tech and scale and algorithms.

Get out of there!

Heh, heh.

It is a little funny that the singing news hoser is what pushes some over the edge on Yahoo. I thought it was much worse when Yahoo CFO Susan Decker publicly gave up on search by saying, "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."

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