Yahoo sees research as key to success
Tim Finin, 8:13am 5 August 2005ZDNet has a good article, Yahoo’s new search master , on Yahoo’s plans to expand its research efforts that is based on an interview with Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Yahoo’s research group. Here’s an interesting quote from the article:
That future technology, according to Raghavan, is diving into the “deep Web” and semi-structured queries. “I hesitate to use the buzzword of ‘Semantic Web’ — but it is about entity extraction, XML queries, unstructured queries, semantic ambiguity. We have to build a view of the world. When you issue a query, it has richer view than a text index. We’ll start to see manifestations of this in five years.”
and another
Yahoo wants to turn its fragmented set of services, content and marketplaces into a cohesive whole and to aggregate, distribute and monetize the creative output of its users. “We have a plethora of opportunities looking at different social networks, such as blogs, instant messaging, My Web, Yahoo 360, and other services, across Yahoo properties,” Raghavan said. Yahoo’s social search engine My Web 2.0, for example, allows Yahoo users to archive, tag and annotate search results and share them with other people using the service. Users can also search their contacts’ My Web and browse content that others on Yahoo’s network have shared.
On a related note, DARPA IPTO Director Ron Brachman announced at AAAI last month that he will join Yahoo to direct world-wide research strategy.
Ebiquity Blog
August 5th, 2005 at 12:06 pm
[...] I’ve thought for a while that there’s a big premium in the offing for the first company with an established Web presence to take advantage of Semantic Web technologies. This ZDNet article makes it sound like Yahoo! are on the trail. The Ebiquity blog also notes that “DARPA IPTO Director Ron Brachman announced at AAAI last month that he will join Yahoo to direct world-wide research strategy”. The name sounded familiar. Yep, he’s a Descriptions Logic guy, has contributed to quite a few papers on the subject including the Handbook intro (PDF). Danny@18:25 | Semantic Web –> [...]