Yahoo!

After writing about personal technology for The Times for 13 years, David Pogue will start a consumer technology Web site at Yahoo.

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New CEO Marissa Mayer launched a redesigned version of the Yahoo homepage on Wednesday, but the site’s new features seem like a lukewarm rehash of the company’s old portal strategy and imitations of what Facebook offers.

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It appears that Yahoo! has sold Delicious to a new company led by YouTube's founders.

The Guardian reports that Yahoo! is rumored to be preparing to sell Delicious to StumbleUpon. From the story:

At the same time of the December announcement the handful of engineers who were developing the Delicious system are understood to have either been sacked or redeployed inside Yahoo, leaving only support staff.

Services like Pinboard and Opera Link exist as potential replacements among other offerings online.

Tara raises an interesting question:

Think about it. We have social networks with their own applications. We have browsers with built in search engines. We access the Internet by mobile phone. Why do we need a search engine based portal like the one Yahoo is putting together? How often do you go to the home page of a search engine? For me it’s almost never; I search via my browser. (I’ll go to a specialty search engine on occasion but the major search engines I’ll search from my browser.) I’ll go to a search engine’s non-search properties, which is what I do with Yahoo; I never go to the Yahoo home page but I’m at Yahoo Daily News constantly.

Wired: Yahoo wants to kill the 10 blue links. The company thinks its customers don’t care how many pages a search engine indexes — nor do they want to search. They want answers.

At least, that’s what Prabhakar Raghavan, who heads Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy told a group of reporters Tuesday at a briefing about Yahoo’s future in search.

Unfortunately, Yahoo had no real innovation to show off — just some better-integrated results and talks of search becoming smarter.

Yahoo Says it's is embracing openness like never before: The open theme continued as they announced they are opening up Yahoo! Search itself. This open search platform enables 3rd parties to build and present the next generation of search results. There are a number of layers and capabilities built into the platform, the goal-- present users with richer, more useful search results so that they can complete their tasks more efficiently and get from "to do" to "done."

Over On MSNBC Eve Tahmincioglu says Even with the $44.6 billion bid by Microsoft Corp. to buy Yahoo Inc., the combined company would be unable to knock Google Inc. off its web search and web advertising throne. Even a merged Microsoft and Yahoo would still be dwarfed by Google. The web giant holds nearly 60 percent of the Internet search market share, compared to what would be a 33 percent stake for the combined Microsoft-Yahoo.

Gary D. Price (MLIS, Librarian, Director of Online Information Resources, Ask.com, Editor, ResourceShelf and DocuTicker) sent over a A Link To Research Paper from the Stanford Info Lab: Questioning Yahoo! Answers.

Yahoo! Answers represents a new type of community portal that allows users to post questions and/or answer questions asked by other members of the community, already featuring a very large number of questions and several million users. Other recently launched services, like Microsoft’s Live QnA and Amazon’s Askville, follow the same basic interaction model. The popularity and the particular characteristics of this model call for a closer study that can help a deeper understanding of the entities involved, their interactions, and the implications of the model. Such understanding is a crucial step in social and algorithmic research that could yield improvements to various components of the service, for instance, personalizing the interaction with the system based on user interest. In this paper, we perform an analysis of 10 months worth of Yahoo! Answers data that provides insights into user behavior and impact as well as into various aspects of the service and its possible evolution.

A Librarian's Worst Nightmare. you can't beat that for a headline! Slate takes a look at Yahoo! Answers and says Yahoo! Answers is so frequently sloppy and inaccurate, it's still the juggernaut in its field. Despite a rapid proliferation of answer-giving sites—Amazon.com's recently inaugurated Askville just joined a crowded field that includes Answerbag, WikiAnswers, AnswerBank, and Ask Metafilter—Yahoo!'s is still by far the most popular.

For a passive reader, this has the same value as listening to two random guys at a bar talk about what to do if you are driving during a tornado. You may not learn very much by eavesdropping—and you certainly shouldn't trust what you hear if disaster strikes—but that isn't really the purpose. The lesson Yahoo! Answers teaches is that, for millions of people on the Web, it's less important to get a good answer than to get someone to listen to your question in the first place.

Yahoo Inc. on Tuesday settled a lawsuit with two Chinese journalists who were jailed after the company provided Chinese authorities with information about their online activities. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

A House committee chairman doesn't buy Yahoo Inc.'s explanation of why it provided incomplete information to Congress about its role in the arrest of a Chinese journalist. "Yahoo claims that this is just one big misunderstanding. Let me be clear — this was no misunderstanding," House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, D-Calif., said in a statement prepared for delivery at a hearing Tuesday.