Yahoo! Labs

R&D Organization to Focus on Developing New Technologies in Search

[Allergic]

[labs.yahoo.com...]

[werty]

Good Find..I was looking for info on local searches and came across it on google news. How did you find it?

Here is the press release on it:

[biz.yahoo.com...]

Jan. 19, 2004--Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - News), a leading global Internet company, has announced the formation of Yahoo! Research Labs (http://labs.yahoo.com), a research organization focused on inventing new technologies and solutions relevant to strategic Yahoo! businesses. The group will pursue a portfolio of topics that include pay for performance search, web search, vertical businesses and platform technologies. The organization will be led by Yahoo!'s Head and Principal Scientist Dr. Gary William Flake, former chief science officer of Overture and founder of Overture Research.

[bostonBeans]

labs.yahoo.com is just the same content that used to be found at research.overture.com. I would have liked research.yahoo.com better. Labs just reminds me of some other search engine.

Here is hoping to they are really committed to pushing search forward.

bB

[sidyadav]

Heres a list of labs:
Google Lab [labs.google.com]
Yahoo Lab [labs.yahoo.com]
Microsoft Research Lab(s) [research.microsoft.com]

Brett, ever thought of opening a WebmasterWorld SEO lab? ;) - Experimenting between Inktomi optimization, Google optiization, PR, Promotion techniques, Link stratagies, PFI and Adwords :) (when you do open it and it hits the Press - don't forget to mention me as "the crazy guy who gave the crazy idea" ;))

Sid

[Brett_Tabke]

Some very interesting reading in the publications division.

[labs.yahoo.com...]

[snookie]

they have a version of natch running, sweet...

[GoogleGuy]

labs.yahoo.com--that's a cool idea. I'm sure every SEO here will have fun doing nutch searches for debt consolidation or viagra, then clicking on the 'explain' link to figure out why their competitors are ranking higher. :)

[research.overture.com...]

".. 91.19 = sum of: weight(url:viagra in 7114773), ... "

For the people who head over to check it out, tf = term frequency and idf = inverse document frequency.

<added>Could anyone get the cluster graph to work? It was down when I tried it. :( </added>

[darkroom]

woah..nice stuff GG..

Thanks
:)

[EquityMind]

Wow, that worked well, an automotive term gave me porn in the SERP.

[willybfriendly]

One cached site I looked at was from early 2003. So much for a fresh index.

WBF

[dirkz]

> do not be surprised or offended if your favorite site is not in the result set for your query

Hehe. SEOs are ALWAYS offended by things like that :)

[sidyadav]

For some strange reason, I tried searching for "Google" in the Nutch demo, it got me 346265 total results, but was unbeleivably slow! took me about atleast 15 seconds to search for it.
I haven't been experiencing such speed problems with other search engines, so I'm sure its the way Nutch searches (Java?).

I also entered a "Cached" page in the demo, that was slow too.

Anybody experiencing similar speed problems?

Sid

[Robert Charlton]

I haven't been experiencing such speed problems with other search engines, so I'm sure its the way Nutch searches (Java?).

For more on Nutch, see this thread:

Nutch.org , Open Source Search Engine
[webmasterworld.com...]

At this point nutch is coded entirely in java...

Oh why did it have to be java?

How many web applications have gone under because java is just too slow

[snookie]

it was fine when I tested. I guess it was being hit hard...

the explain link is surely only there for testing purposes?

having said that, seeing as its open source it might be left so everyone can see how the log works.

java, well I can think of better languages to write many of the "search engine" components in...

[sidyadav]

For more on Nutch, see this thread:

Nutch.org , Open Source Search Engine
[webmasterworld.com...]
yep - I have (had - ages ago) replied to that thread, msg.7 :)

Thats what I meant by "(Java?)".

I guess once Yahoo gets workin' on it, it has a chance of improving, its pretty cool though, never thought there wqould be a demo available on Nutch at Yahoo labs, but hey it is.

What I don't get is how did Yahoo get in hand of the Nutch code? Where is it available for download? Or did Yahoo contact them personally asking for the offer?
I see that both an engineer from Yahoo, and the founder of Nutch, were there on the Foo Camp [webmasterworld.com] , they might have got into a deal over there...

Sid