The Top Query At Today’s Yahoo Event? Bing.
August 24, 2009 ·Filed Under Technology News
The Q&A session following Yahoo’s “What Matters Most” event today was interesting. That is, interesting whether you’re confused by the whole Bing/Yahoo strategy going forward. And it would certainly be understandable whether you were — particularly after an event in which Yahoo did a lot to highlight changes to its search product. You know, the one everyone thought Microsoft was now running.
But there’s an critical distinction within Yahoo’s plans for its own search product going forward, and Microsoft’s plans for it. The easiest way to think about it is that Yahoo will be in charge of the frontend side of things for Yahoo Search, while Microsoft will be in charge of the backend — though not all of it. And Yahoo didn’t shy away from questions today as to whether that means that essentially, Yahoo is still competing with Microsoft in search? From a frontend perspective, which is all most users will ever see, it is, says Yahoo.
Yeah, it’s confusing.
Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo’s Senior VP of Labs and Search Strategy, tried to reply the questions as best he could. But the vibe seemed to be that he felt confined in giving the answers that Yahoo is making all of its execs give. And even though at least half of the questions during the Q&A session were about Yahoo’s deal with Microsoft, it was clear that plenty of the journalists and bloggers in the audience still weren’t entirely clear what the plan is. Or that Yahoo really knows what the plan is.
“We are not a version of Bing. We are the Yahoo search experience,” Raghavan said at one point. And he continued on that it was a complex deal, and not as easy to explain or execute as a straight-up acquisition would be. I’ll say.
While Yahoo is full of PR-ready answers that seem to confuse even them, here’s how I interpreted what Yahoo was basically saying today: “We are Yahoo Search, powered by Bing, but we don’t want you to know we’re powered by Bing.”
Elisa Steele, Chief
And it’s too poor. After the last event which focused on their search innovation (before the Microsoft deal), I was harsh in my criticism of Yahoo, saying that they weren’t doing sufficient on the frontend to ever take users away from Google. At today’s event, a new frontend is precisely what they showed off, and some of it looks very good. The people-search aspect in specific strikes me as something I would use, as soon as it gets a way to filter things like tweets by most recent updates — which it’s getting, I’m told.
The left-side filters work well as an obvious visual way to scour various popular services that Yahoo has included. We currently use Yahoo BOSS to capability TechCrunch search, it was impressive that when I did a search for my name, one of the options was to see all the TechCrunch articles by me.
Certainly it’s in Yahoo’s interest to get citizens using Yahoo more, but it is too poor that the main benefactor of all the work Yahoo has been doing to produce the frontend of its search more compelling may be Microsoft. I wonder whether in a year’s date we won’t just consider Yahoo Search to be the prettier version of Bing.
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