Yahoo takes on Google

June 28, 2005 9:43 PM

Yahoo gets social. Yahoo's new search is designed around your contact list. Save a few bookmarks with some notes and the next time anyone within two degrees of you searches on that topic, they'll see your bookmarks above random search results. Oh, and it's got tags too. Will this kill search engine gaming? What's Google going to do to compete, buy delicious and incorporate that?
posted by mathowie (28 comments total)

buy delicious and incorporate that?

that'd be cool. maybe there'd be less server timeouts.

the problem with this foaf crap is that if you have friends that aren't on the bleeding edge, it's a pain in the ass to get them to sign up or switch services.

of course, we're all the glittering digerati here; we don't have that problem, am i rite?
posted by keswick at 10:04 PM on June 28, 2005

Sounds a lot like Outfoxed.
posted by blendor at 10:05 PM on June 28, 2005

It's rather cumbersome. Even though I already have a Yahoo! account, I had to sign up for My Web and to add contacts, I had to start a blog at Yahoo! 360°.
posted by Monochrome at 10:05 PM on June 28, 2005

I'm familiar with search communities, for example stumbleupon, where people trade interesting links among a social structure. This seems more than that, maybe?

For me, I'm either doing a highly specialized search ("automata history"), in which case its doubtful that any of my friends have anything to add or I am trying to find something very very specific ("Which was the first book written on Dream Interpretations?") or I am trying to find something mundane ("roofers san francisco")

In the latter case it'd be helpful but I would doubt my friends would bookmark websites of services they recommend. Sites like Yelp! seem better for that type of thing. So, there must be a middle ground I'm missing. Also, I know I am atypical but: What would be an example search in which this would be useful?
posted by vacapinta at 10:07 PM on June 28, 2005

That's to much tech-trendyness in one spot, I think. The whole thing risks a meltdown.

Of course, they do have the general lameness of Yahoo! to moderate the reaction.
posted by delmoi at 10:08 PM on June 28, 2005

I can see a small group organizing searches this way. Let's say the members of a Yahoo Group discussing Doc Savage join this beta. Most, if not all, already have Yahoo accounts. If they add each other as contacts it wouldn't take long to build a good set of Doc Savage and pulp related bookmarks.

But for the general public I'm not so sure. I bet the "two degrees of" aspect doesn't become as popular as the tagging.

I wonder how well it would work to subscribe to the tags as an RSS feed? Wait, they have it. But it isn't available right now.
posted by ?! at 10:20 PM on June 28, 2005

Also, I know I am atypical but: What would be an example search in which this would be useful?

So far the useful searches I've seen balance general interest with something specific. If you do a search for San Francisco restaurant you'll find everyone's favorite sushi and dim sum places. It does show you the "everyone" saved bookmark matches when your friends haven't saved any.

I think the problem with this social search is you need a lot of friends and a lot of bookmarks to make it really interesting. Like I think it'll take having half of metafilter on my buddy list and six months of everyone bookmarking stuff to find anything in most of my daily searches.
posted by mathowie at 10:22 PM on June 28, 2005

But...Matt. People here have been bookmarking things here for years. We call it "posting" and as for "contact lists" metafilter has that too. ;)

Anyways, i understand the delicious aspect of this. But I'm trying to get my head around how its more than that. I can see the value on general interest topics such as "ebooks" but again thats just a delicious example.

So, I guess what I'm having trouble seeing is the value between the marriage of delicious and search engine functionality. In your example, I cant say I bookmark my favorite restaurants or hiking areas or anything like that. I bookmark sites themselves that I like. So, again, it might be useful to see what comics sites I read but then we're back to delicious (use my "comics" tag). Whats a narrower search, not a general interest search, where this, as we say, creates value?

One example I can think of is large research sites. For example, I am looking into information on Measles. If you do that on a general interest search you'll get tons of websites. Which can you trust? Presumably, some of your friends may have bookmarked reputable health sites and those would rise to the top. Thats one example I can think of ... but it feels kind of strained and thats why I am wondering what I'm missing...
posted by vacapinta at 10:39 PM on June 28, 2005

Well, I guess a search for restaurants doesn't make sense.

Do a google search for "digital camera" and you'll get a gazillion results, few of which are useful. Do it here and hopefully your friends bookmarked the cameras they bought and liked with short notes as to why.
posted by mathowie at 11:11 PM on June 28, 2005

I think it's an interesting idea, because if nothing else it's a realization that there are many metrics or axes to search along.

I may want a different type of 'flat' vs 'deep' when searching for restaurants in SF than, say, machine learning algorithms; some subjects I'm the first in my pod to explore, others the last - this would affect how much I want my friends in my search; all manners of factors, not all of which can be built into one algorithm or syntax. I tend to think of one search metric, with my varying needs encoded in varying searchstrings.

I do think it funny that we build all this cool info tech, and then the coolest newest tech is "you can ask your friends!"
posted by freebird at 1:29 AM on June 29, 2005

Do it here and hopefully your friends bookmarked the cameras they bought and liked with short notes as to why.

See, I doub't, in reality, that many people would do this. Within certain groups of people, with an agreement and understanding that they should bookmark everything of interest, it would be good. But with the average Yahoo! user, and probably the average user of the internet in general, that's not how people bookmark.

I'm just looking through my history of Google searches, and I can find very little that I would expect any "online" friends to have looked at before me, let alone bookmarked so they could return to it. The possible exception is with, say, my academic colleagues. If I had them all on Yahoo! (which I don't - we sit in the same office) and they all bookmarked and tagged every interesting paper, then it could be useful. But I don't turn to Yahoo! or even Google for my research.

I think returning a global search to del.icio.us would be much more useful.
posted by Jimbob at 2:19 AM on June 29, 2005

Sounds a lot like Outfoxed.

From their website: There are over 8 billion web pages. Most of them suck.

There are over 3 major operating systems. One of them sucks.
And it's the one they support. :-) (No response necessary, this is a joke.)

I, for one, will keep adding bookmarks to delicious.
posted by stiggywigget at 3:28 AM on June 29, 2005

Uh, from the Outfoxed web site, that is.
posted by stiggywigget at 3:28 AM on June 29, 2005

Even though I already have a Yahoo! account, I had to sign up

This brings up the issue of Yahoo's inherent customer hostility. When you couple that with the centralisation required to use and customise its services, and its lack of provision for export or backup, it's a recipe for disaster.

I speak from jaundiced experience. I had a Yahoo account, active and fully tricked out, since 1996 or so. Then one day a couple of years ago bam, no login, account "suspended due to violation of TOS". That's all I got, no explanation, no review. All mail, contacts, notes, points, photos, customisations wiped, disappeared into a void. No chance of recovery.

The more stuff you roll into a single dodgy provider with questionable customer policies, the more vulnerable you become to capricious or malicious actions. And now Yahoo seriously expects people to begin putting *more* of their datacloud into their black hole servers? Yahoo is evil.
posted by meehawl at 4:17 AM on June 29, 2005

Yeah, unfortunately I'm happy with del.icio.us and use feeds of my friends bookmarking to find new stuff out, but as far as using their preferences for searching I think it will take inordinate numbers of users and really good statistics and algorithms for this to not add more noise into my searches.

However, from a providers point of view I think it could be a good idea, and great potential for niche market research.
posted by blindsam at 5:28 AM on June 29, 2005

Yahoo gets an A for effort lately, that's for sure. Their penmanship sucks, though.

It all seems laughably scattershot of late, Flickr aquisition included, as does Google's forays into anything other than the fucking ad-revenue generator it has become, geek-wood erecting as they may be.

I'm probably just bitter that I have 5 better ideas than some of this crap before my first goddamn coffee of the morning, but I'm not in the game no more, by choice.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:34 AM on June 29, 2005

The more stuff you roll into a single dodgy provider with questionable customer policies, the more vulnerable you become to capricious or malicious actions.

for a few net trinkets, they own you.
for a few shekels more, they'll sell you out.
apologies to van morrison.
posted by quonsar at 5:34 AM on June 29, 2005

the problem with this foaf crap is that if you have friends that aren't on the bleeding edge, it's a pain in the ass to get them to sign up or switch services.

of course, we're all the glittering digerati here; we don't have that problem, am i rite?

A solution to this, and to those who just don't have a lot of contacts in general, could be to create a dummy account like 'Metafilter', and those interested who believe mefites generally bookmark higher-quality sites could then add that account as a friend. Then all Metafilter users could be within two degrees of each other.
posted by Bokononist at 6:22 AM on June 29, 2005

I could care less about the search engine part, but it's a better looking delicious. Now I want to know how to import all 650 of my delicious links.
posted by corpse at 6:41 AM on June 29, 2005

meehawl writes "I had a Yahoo account, active and fully tricked out, since 1996 or so. Then one day a couple of years ago bam, no login, account 'suspended due to violation of TOS'."

I just wish Yahoo would stop buying up the cool toys and then sucking them up. I've been burned twice by them with this (geocities and eGroups) and it ticks me off to no end. Here's hoping Google can continue to not screw up their aquisitions.
posted by Mitheral at 6:53 AM on June 29, 2005

The possible exception is with, say, my academic colleagues. If I had them all on Yahoo! (which I don't - we sit in the same office) and they all bookmarked and tagged every interesting paper, then it could be useful.

Jimbob: Have you tried CiteULike?
posted by mlis at 7:06 AM on June 29, 2005

I could care less about the search engine part, but it's a better looking delicious. Now I want to know how to import all 650 of my delicious links.

I couldn't get it to import all my del.icio.us at once, but after you create an account, there's an import link on the toolbar that let's you import from RSS. Importing from the delicious RSS feed preserves the tags.
posted by Mahogne at 9:05 AM on June 29, 2005

Yeah, I tried that and it only pulled in 35....
posted by corpse at 9:33 AM on June 29, 2005

What's Google going to do to compete, buy delicious and incorporate that?

Build a bookmark manager of their own, maybe. And use it to improve their personalized search.
posted by bragadocchio at 10:19 AM on June 29, 2005

I like yahoo has tags seperated by commas instead of spaces, it's much more natural. Tags without spaces within them seems like a throwback to old unix systems.

It does look like it has some real improvements over del.icio.us, the saving of a cache of a page is great. So many of my older bookmarks are 404s now that I wish my browser would automatically save cached copies, I do that myself for some pages but it's so awkward having to find a directory and renaming the file (firefox names this page an unhelpful 43127.htm, and ie frequently saves pages with 100+ character filenames).
posted by bobo123 at 10:48 AM on June 29, 2005

It seems to me that it can work best for stuff that is either something really hard to find and obscure, or something that is really overloaded on the internet such as the digital cameras example.
posted by chaz at 11:24 AM on June 29, 2005

A solution to this, and to those who just don't have a lot of contacts in general, could be to create a dummy account like 'Metafilter', and those interested who believe mefites generally bookmark higher-quality sites could then add that account as a friend. Then all Metafilter users could be within two degrees of each other.

I really don't see the application of stuff like this to social networks. It becomes more useful when applied to groups of people with common interests or common goals. I didn't download this Yahoo service (I have enough toolbars thank you) but it looks useful for organisations or departments within organisations or even project teams.

My team uses Spurl to share bookmarks and this works well since we have common interests and common goals. Spurl doesn't directly support group bookmarks but we just use a single common account that we each access when required.

BTW the best social bookmarking service I've came across is Furl.
posted by bobbyelliott at 2:12 PM on June 29, 2005

I second bobbyelliott in that this seems like it'd be the most useful for groups of people with common interests or common goals. It'd be neat to see an application of this social searching in an academic environment.. so if you're thinking about writing a paper about pancakes and you plug pancakes into this search, you can see that Joe the Grad Student and Jane the Professor have a slew of bookmarks about and around the topic of pancakes (and the related topic of waffles) and maybe you'll check their links out first and then maybe go talk to them later about your paper. Or if no one's bookmarked anything, you can still look at the normal www results the search engine brings up, and then maybe bookmark a few of them yourself if you think they're worth recalling later.

That's kind of an ideal scenario though, and Yahoo's implementation does seem kind of awkward right now.
posted by Carol O at 7:47 PM on June 29, 2005