Posted on March 30th, 2009 by Atif
It was great to attend the Kelsey Marketplaces Conference in L.A. earlier in March, where I presented for Yahoo! on a panel about Local Verticals. Kelsey is the definitive conference for all things Local. It’s a tremendous place to soak in sector knowledge and get networking done.
In the words of the conference organizers: “Much of the opportunity in local marketplaces lies with the verticals that extend and energize traditional media.” They’re referring to categories such as entertainment, news, auto, real estate, etc. where local content is important.
My take has long been that we need to put the “L” into the local market opportunity. Think “L” versus the lower-case “l” that defines this category today. User needs in the local market extend beyond the traditional scope of business listing and point-of-interest information (e.g., looking-up restaurant information and reviews).
Y! Local (the business I manage) is intended for this core use case and it’s a sizable in and of itself (one of Y!’s largest properties, BTW). But it’s only part of the wider local opportunity. We need to think about the horizontal opportunity and the cross-programming model behind it. No portal has a done a good job of that yet.
In terms of serving vertical needs within the current scope of Y! Local, we make some attempt of that today. But we don’t think the answer is to add more web sites to our product portfolio to enable this. My primary message is that users don’t need more destination sites to visit. The more convenient alternative is to add vertical content to existing services based on user intent. Alot of what we do in Y! Local is focused on local search so to the extent we can understand what the user is searching for, we can add vertical content on a category by category basis.
Examples can include:
- Adding menu information when we know it’s a restaurant query
- Adding service records and reports when we know the search is for a plumber or contractor
- Adding reservation or booking information when we know it’s a search for a doctor / dentist, etc.
This takes a good understanding of explicit and implicit user intent, something Y! has unique capabilities to address given our search capabilities.
The presentation I gave is below.
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Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Atif
If you’re an investor in Apple or just one of the many admirers of this iconic business, you may be closely following news about the health of Steve Jobs. The cliché that people are a company’s greatest asset was literally demonstrated as this news surfaced — AAPL lost 5.7% of its value after his medical leave was announced. Is this the beginning of the end for the company or just a period of transition during a time of continued leadership? An opinion on the matter is vital to investors - should you be buying on unnecessary weakness or be gradually reducing your exposure? To develop an informed opinion you’re going to have to do some diligence.
I’m going to offer an approach toward diligence that uses web connections to define key topics for your assessment. Web connections are links between a story you’re following and the endless number of topics that exist in the world. It may sound quite broad and unwieldy but there is a manageable structure we can put around the information possibilities.
Web connections allow us to explore these topics by the degree of their relatedness. Think of it as swinging from vine to vine in a jungle of information. You can build upon a topic of interest by knowing what else is connected to it rather than limit exploration by direct coverage of what you’re reading.”
What’s useful about these connections is they transcend the obvious information you will find collected in most articles or coverage about a story you’re following. As I’ll explain later on, that’s not a knock on reporters but instead a natural limitation of what’s possible for any writer to cover in a single story. Put another way, web connections extend our journey into and behind the story. Read more »
Filed under: Management, People, Search Technology, Web Apps, Web Connections | 1 Comment »
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Posted on July 14th, 2007 by Atif
Fortune held its high-profile iMeme conference last week, which is billed as venue to bring together the “Thinkers of Tech.”
I found the substance of the conference lived up to its aspirational billing. Many factors influence the utility of an event including the speaker line-up, topics, format and quality of the audience. This event rated highly among those criteria. One additional consideration was the moderation style, lead by Fortune reporters, who often didn’t refrain from asking tough questions and probing into sensitive but relevant issues. Fortune played to its strength by leveraging the journalistic voices of its staff to drive meaningful dialogue amongst panelists.
This approach made for a very lively session on the search business, where rival companies were assembled to speak about business strategy. The search panel included Sheryl Sandberg (Vice President, Global Online Sales and Operations) from Google, Jeff Weiner (Executive Vice President) from Yahoo, Yusuf Mehdi (Senior Vice President and Chief Advertising Strategist) from Microsoft and Jim Lanzone (CEO) from Ask. Herding the first three companies onto the same stage in the current market environment is as close as you can come in business to pure theater. While these executives are too polished and experienced to draw direct comparisons to each other’s businesses, it’s not too difficult to read between the lines and get a glimpse into how these companies are framing high-stakes competitive dynamics.
Each company discussed current initiatives. Google didn’t share much new perspective, except to say that users still only receive a small portion of their daily information from Google despite it’s dominance, meaning more of the world’s information needs to be brought onto the web. “We think there is a long way for us to go,” said Sheryl Sandberg.
While Yahoo and Microsoft may have conceded this round of the battle, they have several initiatives in the works, some of which were explained. Read more »
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Posted on June 15th, 2007 by Atif
I’ll admit to being schizophrenic in my web usage. This explains why plain-vanilla Google is set as my default browser homepage. On the one hand, I don’t want anything pre-defined for me when I start web browsing. The idea of a personalized page with feeds from sources tailored to my interests feels limiting to me. That may sound counter-intuitive because the point of such personalization is to save me time and effort by aggregating what I’ve defined as important. But it just doesn’t work for me precisely because it’s pre-defined. I prefer to start knowing that the whole web is my oyster.Google’s simple search box respects this sentiment. It stares back at me, daring me to query. It’s a much better starting companion on a journey into the web because it allows me to start anywhere I want.
For example, I often use it to type in the URL for a favorite sports site. I use Google’s box like a keystroke command. I find that easier than navigating to the address bar on the toolbar and mucking around with the entire address. Of course, I can just enter some query terms in the event I ‘m casually or seriously looking for new information. Like you, curiosity strikes me about a half dozen times a day and having Google there as my homepage is my zero latency strategy.
Another way to frame the issue is to say that web schizophrenia comes from the fact that I want nothing and everything at the same time. Google is the only product that offers that to me right now. Read more »
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Filed under: Google, Search Technology, User Experiences, Web Apps, Innovation | 1 Comment »
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Posted on May 31st, 2007 by Atif
Vertical search is not a new area of web apps but I learned something new about it recently. I attended a panel of CTO’s from the space yesterday at the Silicon Valley Web Builder event. Participating companies included Simply Hired, Spock, MEDgle and Riya. Each representative took a couple of minutes to conduct a product demonstration. Spock is still in a private beta, so it was neat to see it in action . My first impressions were very positive.
What’s interesting is that even though these are all search companies, none of the products are competitive. You might think this a very natural dynamic. After all, each vertical is necessarily focused on different slices of web content. But there’s more that makes search a different app as you move from vertical to vertical. It’s not simply a matter of different information. For me, the dividing line between these apps is rooted in how users interact with that information. The way the search process is organized to help users negotiate that interaction can vary widely from app to app. Read more »
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Posted on May 25th, 2007 by Atif
I attended The Semantic Conference this week in San Jose. One of the most interesting talks was given by Mills Davis, who is a recognized expert in this area. Mills spoke about his Semantic Wave project and research. One part of the research hypothesizes an adoption cycle for different phases of the web. In other words, different paradigms for the organization and use of web content. They shift over time as the industry and technology matures. I will post this slide of his presentation soon.
The framework looks at two dimensions for the advancement of the web. First, there is the strength of the semantics. That refers to the degree of knowledge representation in the way information is defined for computers. You can have weak or strong semantics surrounding the same given piece of data (say, my contact information). The other dimension is the degree of reasoning capability of tools and applications. This is a smart way of framing the opportunity because it highlights essential trade-offs. Read more »
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Posted on May 20th, 2007 by Atif
Video is getting a lot of attention on the web today and rightfully so. But what does this mean for the text-web (you know, information produced in plain-old written form)?
Some Internet analysts are predicting that video will dominate the web content within 5 years.
I don’t agree with that statement despite being very bullish on video web apps.
Video has a huge and growing place in media consumption. No big revelation. One testament to its growing influence on the web is Google Universal Search, which subtly integrates video (along with map, book, blog and image) content into traditional search results. But it’s simplistic to believe that anything produced in text today can be better consumed in video. The written word is and will remain the optimal form for a lot of content. Yes, the same news story can be transformed into news video. But the relevance of one over the other is a function of user needs. Read more »
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