Yahoo!

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

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.

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."

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.