Posted March 1st, 2010 at 9:45 pm by Lucas Mast, Blog Editor
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We want to share our pride, gratitude and excitement on this 15th birthday, with all Yahoo! users (600 million of them), customers and partners. It continues to be an incredible ride for the two of us, as well as for thousands of Yahoo! employees we have had the privilege of working with over the years.
We’ve had the unique opportunity to help create an industry and shape the online world, and will continue to focus on the values that brought us here —working hard, having fun, being passionate about your ideas, believing in each other, and always trying to invent the future. And as we celebrate 15 years today, we are even more excited than ever about what lies ahead, and the potential of Yahoo! and the Internet.
Of course, we didn’t set out to start one of the world’s largest Internet companies or be leading a movement that has changed the world. We were just a couple of Stanford graduate students doing our research (supposedly) while our professor was on sabbatical.
More interesting than our research was our total fascination with the web and all the cool stuff it suddenly made available. But it was incredibly hard to keep track of the thousands of great websites sprouting up everywhere. We thought it would be fun to catalog the sites by developing a simple directory. So all this began with nothing more than a hobby to help other early Internet users.
Amazing things happen when we’re doing what’s fun.
We soon learned a huge lesson just as relevant today as then: change and growth on the Internet happen at warp speed—especially if you’re filling a need. With the proliferation of websites and with hundreds of thousands of people accessing our guide, it was simply impossible for us to continue doing this on our own.
Taking big steps takes belief in yourself—and in others.
After many late nights and a lot of pizza, we decided to take the big leap, turn our hobby into a business, raise money and devote ourselves totally to building a company. This was no sure thing. For example, 15 years ago, we wanted a free service that was ad-supported. But the conventional wisdom was that our business needed to be subscription-based. Few people thought that advertising could be the key revenue generator for the Internet. Of course, the conventional wisdom was wrong and so today we know that August, 1995, the month our first ad went live, was a critical milestone in the history of Yahoo!, as well as the history of the internet.
Focus on the future: it still looks phenomenal.
Internet growth continues to be simply phenomenal, and we’re nowhere near done. Fifteen years ago, there were 18,000 web sites and fewer than 10 million people globally on the Internet—less than one third of a single percent of the world’s population at the time. Today there are more than 200 million websites with 90,000 created daily. There are estimated to be 1.6 billion people on the internet today—about 25 percent of the world’s population.
These numbers are astonishing, but even more important and more exciting is the impact that the Internet is having on so many people around the world. From socio-economic opportunities to more accessible health care to educating the next generation and beyond, the Internet has changed the way we live, work and learn. It has overcome geographic and political barriers and has made it possible for people to raise their voices as they seek greater economic opportunity and freedom. And Yahoo! has been a leader in enabling these tremendous technological advancements every step of the way.
Let’s aim to be even prouder fifteen years from now than we are today!
All this in just 15 years. Yahoo! has been built by thousands of dedicated employees, hundreds of millions of loyal users and scores of advertisers who envisioned a future that was exciting, challenging and at times daunting. To work in the sandbox that is Yahoo! and the evolution of the Internet is truly amazing.
And yet as fast as the Internet and Yahoo! have grown and as remarkably our lives have changed, we are just at the beginning of this great transformation.
The Internet still has enormous and untapped potential. There are billions of more people we need to drive online, and then provide them with relevant content and opportunities that they’ve never dreamed about before.
We are confident that 15 years from today, we will look back in marvel at how far you, and the Internet have traveled in such a short time. Just as we are doing today.
Jerry Yang and David Filo
Co-Founders & Chief Yahoos
Tagged: 15th, birthday, david filo, jerry yang, yahoo
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Posted March 1st, 2010 at 9:10 pm by Lucas Mast, Blog Editor
5 Comments » / Filed in: 15th Birthday
To celebrate our 15th Birthday we are hosting a trivia challenge on Twitter (say that five times fast!) featuring 15 questions across our global properties, helping you search and discover all the exciting things Yahoo! has to offer!
How the trivia challenge works: We will post each of the 15 questions on our official Yahoo! Twitter account (http://www.twitter.com/yahoo) every hour, starting on March 2nd, 2010 at 8 AM PT. Each question will start with a question number, such as “Q1”, “Q2”, and so on. Find the answer to each question by using the link we provide to the Yahoo! site where the answer can be found. Tweet your response to @yahoo using the hashtag #Y15a. Start your answer with the letter “A” (for “answer”), and the number of the question you’re answering. So, for example, if you’re answering question 5, your reply should look something like:
A5 <this is your answer to Question 5> #y15a.
Easy enough? You can get one entry for each question you answer, for up to 15 possible entries in the challenge. You have until 8 AM on March 5, 2010 to get all of your answers back to us. After the challenge is over, we’ll select the winners from among all the eligible entries we received during the entry period.
What you are playing for: One Grand Prize winner will receive a Nikon Cool Pix S230 Yahoo! Camera and a Jawbone Earcandy Bluetooth Headset (ARV $305). Plus, four first prize winners will each receive a Mimobot Yahoo! USB flash drive. (ARV $20)
Anything else you should know? Our friend Matt the lawyer would also like you know that there’s no purchase necessary and the challenge is void where prohibited. The challenge is open to legal residents of the fifty United States, the District of Columbia, and Canada, excluding the Province of Quebec, who are 18 and older.
Happy hunting!
Start now by following us on Twitter: @Yahoo
For the complete list of rules, click here
Tagged: 15th, birthday, challenge, prizes, trivia, twitter, winner, yahoo
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Posted March 1st, 2010 at 2:30 pm by Lucas Mast, Blog Editor
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In a keynote speech at the 4A’s Transformation 2010 conference today, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz stated that Yahoo! can bring advertisers a combination of strengths that no one else can, because only Yahoo! offers them three things: science, art and scale.
Speaking to the advertising industry group in San Francisco, Carol said, “We want Yahoo! to be the partner you turn to for answers and solutions, and most importantly—when you want results.” By providing science, art and scale, Yahoo can help advertisers and agencies master online advertising.
To read more about Carol’s 4A’s keynote and Yahoo’s value proposition to advertisers, please check out the original post on the Yahoo! Advertising Blog.
Tagged: 4As, advertisers, art, carol bartz, scale, science, yahoo
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Posted February 25th, 2010 at 5:09 pm by Lucas Mast, Blog Editor
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The Art and Science of Advertising
Key Scientific Challenges Blog Series, Entry # 4:
Late January, we announced the kick-off of our 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program, what we hope is a thought-provoking series of guest blog posts here on Yodel Anecdotal that offer a quick overview of these scientific challenge areas. Check out our last post on microeconomics and social systems.
Today, we cover advertising, which is yet another important topic related to the Web. We’ve recruited Vanja Josifovski from Yahoo! Labs to give you a glimpse of how significant advertising is to the online world.
If you’ve seen Mad Men, you’ll know what it’s like to develop an infatuation with the 1960s advertising world – the fashion, the glamour, the old technology. While we’ve come a long way since then, advertising continues to remain a large part of our daily lives and a permanent fixture of our online experience. Here at Yahoo!, we have a special appreciation for the undercurrents of online advertising because it supports a large swath of the Internet ecosystem.
Generally, web advertising closely follows the same two major models of traditional advertising.
First, there is direct advertising, which simply means that the goal of the ad is to get a direct response from the viewer. A good example is sponsored search where ads are shown beside a search result. The most difficult thing with this type of advertising is making sure the ads are relevant. If you searched for the word puzzle – did you mean jigsaw, crossword or Legos? These are complex issues we have spent a lot of time thinking about – and not in the Mad-Men-sit-back-with-whiskey way, but more of a microeconomics, super-computing way.
And then there is brand advertising, which aims to create a favorable impression about a brand or a product. In this construct, ads are usually served up by graphical means, in what we call display ads on web pages. The challenge is matching the placement/context of the ad with behavior of the viewer, both of which also introduce a stunning number of variables and data points.
In both modes – search and display – some complex learning algorithms are needed to provide relevant ads to a user. In a nutshell, it is this problem of relevance that makes advertising one of our Key Scientific Challenges. And it’s also central to the somewhat newer concept of computational advertising — a scientific discipline we developed at Yahoo! Labs that aims to formalize the problem of finding the best ad for a given user in a given context.
It sounds logical enough, right? Can we really build a system that serves the most relevant ad to a user every single time? Can we bring advertising into the realm of the other “computational” sciences? Well, we think so and we’re working hard to tackle that kind of personal relevance. It’s simply going to take some hard core science, some persistence, and continued sharp thinking and hopefully more programs like those at universities (Stanford has a leg up) and our own Key Scientific Challenges to crack it.
Vanja Josifovski
Yahoo! Labs
P.S. If you’re curious about just how big a deal Computational Advertising is, one of Yahoo!’s foremost experts in the field, Andrei Broder, was just elected to the National Academy Engineering. That’s pretty good testimony that advertising is a little bit art AND science.
Tagged: advertising, Brand, Key Scientific Challenges, Search and Display, stanford
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Posted February 24th, 2010 at 11:25 am by Lucas Mast, Blog Editor
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This week at the University of Washington we are thrilled to be kicking off the second half of the 2009-2010 Hack U™ season. The University of Washington hack will be followed by events at Georgia Tech, UT Austin and UC San Diego throughout March and April.
During each of these hack events, Yahoo! developers teach passionate CS, HCI and engineering students about the latest and greatest open tools and technologies and web programming tips in a series of tech talks, then spend 24 hours with them to help them build their dream hack for the competition held at the end of the week. In true Yahoo! style, the all night contest is filled with fun, free food, schwag, prizes, Wii games and plenty of caffeine!
At the end of the season, the winners from each university will be flown by Yahoo! to our University Hack Showdown, which is normally held in conjunction with Yahoo!’s Open Hack Day, where they will hack it out for street cred, cool prizes and the opportunity to get their hack noticed by web industry judges, including VCs, web entrepreneurs, Yahoo! execs and technology gurus.
“The close of 2009 marked the third year of the Hack U™ program and it’s been amazing to watch the innovation, spirit and quality of the hacks continue to grow, said Jamie Lockwood, program manager for Hack U™. “The students used to just mash up as many open technologies as they could barely thinking about UI or what problem the hack solves, but today we see ideas and prototypes coming together that are more and more sophisticated and in some cases almost ready to go to market.”
The winning Hack U™ students from last season had no problem holding their own against the experienced developers that showed up at the Yahoo! Open Hack event in NYC, winning half of the categories including best overall hack.
The program has definitely caught the attention of Yahoo!’s internal open tech leaders, as well as the external web community. The Hack U™ winners from Toronto even snagged an interview at Y Combinator with their hack idea.
You can read more about the program and view some of the other hacks that have been developed at universities across the country and the world (we had our first India Hack U event at IIT earlier this year!) on the Yahoo! Developer Network site.
Hack U events have been held at some of the best engineering universities around the country including UC Berkeley, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, University of Washington and University of Illinois and we’re always on the lookout for other universities that want to be part of the growing Hack U community We also want to keep the technology topics fresh, timely and up to speed with the latest web industry innovations so feel free to send us requests for specific speakers or ideas for suggested topics.
Check out the website for more information, updates and details about the upcoming 2010 schedule.
– Yahoo! Academic Relations and Hack U™ Team
Tagged: Hack-U, open hack day, UC San Diego, University, UT Austin, yahoo! labs
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Posted February 23rd, 2010 at 10:01 pm by Lucas Mast, Blog Editor
4 Comments » / Filed in: General
We all know that the Web makes the world a much smaller place, and we have some great news to share today that will make your Web world smaller and easier, while at the same time expanding your social world online! We’re partnering with Twitter to integrate their real-time social experience into our global network.
What does this mean for you? Very soon, you will be able to see your Twitter feed on Yahoo! just as easily as you use Yahoo! to consume all of the other great content you love from across the Web. Through today’s partnership, along with our recently announced Facebook relationship, Yahoo! is giving your online social life wings to help you stay in touch with the people and things you care about most across the Web. It’s part of our strategy to ensure that Yahoo! delivers the people and things that matter most to you!
Want to see your friends’ latest Twitter posts? Or update your Twitter feed with stories and content from Yahoo!? Or check out trending topics and public updates? You no longer need to stop what you’re doing to see what’s going on with your Twitterverse — you’ll be able to do it all from Yahoo!.
As part of Yahoo!’s Open Strategy (Y!OS) to make the Web more open and relevant, we’re helping you zero in on what’s important to you:
- Coming Soon: Read your personal Twitter feeds directly from Yahoo!’s many products and properties, including the homepage, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, and others — anywhere you can see Yahoo! Updates across our network.
- Coming Soon: Update your Twitter status and share content from Yahoo! in your Twitter stream — we’ve made it even easier to share what’s going on with your friends and followers on Yahoo! and Twitter.
- Coming Soon: Whenever you produce social actions on any website (like comments on articles, ratings, buzzes on Yahoo! Buzz) that you’ve allowed to appear on Yahoo! Updates, those actions can also be shared automatically with your friends on Twitter. (Pssst: Publishers and developers interested in learning more about Yahoo! Updates, including publishing directly into it or using Yahoo! Buzz or the Yahoo! Application Platform as ways of driving social traffic to your site, look here , here and here.
- Coming Soon: Yahoo! media properties like News, Finance, Entertainment, and Sports will include real-time public Twitter updates, allowing you to get a quick pulse-check on topics, trending and otherwise.
- Available Today: Yahoo! Search users will immediately see real-time Twitter results starting today.
The real-time Search integration is available immediately, with other features of the integration to be launched later this year. Go on, give it a test flight: Go to Yahoo! Search to check out how we just made your Web world smaller, yet larger at the same time.
Bryan Lamkin
SVP, Consumer Products Group, Yahoo!
Tagged: buzz, facebook, Feed, Live, search, social media, Status Updates, twitter, yahoo, yahoo! mail, YOS
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Posted February 19th, 2010 at 2:39 pm by Lucas Mast, Blog Editor
1 Comment » / Filed in: Uncategorized
By Travis Reiman, Dean of Students at W.L. Henry Elementary School in Hillsboro, OR
Editor’s Note: Each month, Yahoo! for Good unleashes Purple Acts of Kindness to surprise and delight our local communities. In February, we brought extra cheer to classroom teachers in Hillsboro by delivering purple flowers and gift cards for Valentine’s Day arts and crafts projects. Here’s an account from their Dean of Students.
Last Thursday, the classroom teachers here at W.L. Henry Elementary School in Hillsboro, OR got a special surpise. As vases of beautiful purple flowers were delivered, there were plenty of smiles and lots of confused looks. Is my husband just trying to be sweet??? Did I finally win the lottery??? No one has ever sent me flowers before!!!
Everyone was shocked and excited when they discovered they were the beneficiaries of Yahoo!’s Purple Acts of Kindness Program. In addition to the bouquets, all 19 classroom teachers received $100 gift cards. The gift cards were meant to be used for the school’s Valentine’s Day celebrations so that students could have an extra special day.
This special gift was a great reward for all the hard work and effort W.L. Henry’s students put into learning this year. For the teachers, this opportunity to give their students an afternoon of special arts and crafts projects, candy, gifts, and fun put huge smiles on their faces. Thanks so much, Yahoo!.
Tagged: Kindness, purple acts of kindness, Shcool, Valentine's, Yahoo! For Good
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Posted February 19th, 2010 at 12:37 pm by Lucas Mast, Blog Editor
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Measuring the Unmeasurable
Key Scientific Challenges, Entry #3: Microeconomics and Social Systems
On January 27 we announced the kick-off of our 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program. To highlight the scientific challenge areas included in the program, we launched a series of guest blog posts earlier this month on Yodel Anecdotal. Read our previous post on privacy and security, “Data, Data Everywhere, but How to Keep it Safe.”
Another big challenge are Yahoo!’s research scientists are continually examining is microeconomics and social systems. In this entry, Sharad Goel from Yahoo! Labs shares some thoughts on how Yahoo! is tackling the new opportunities for research into the social sciences that the Web is making possible and why it’s a fascinating field.
What do your friends really know about you? How much do they influence your decisions? How often do we stray from the cultural herd? How do groups organize to solve complex problems?
Answers to such fundamental questions about social behavior have often eluded us. With microscopes we peered into the intangibly small building blocks of life, and with telescopes we found our place in an unimaginably expansive universe. But without the tools to faithfully document human activity—a challenge that by comparison seems so palpable—we had no way to investigate the inner workings of our own communities. Now with an explosion of information on every aspect of our everyday existence—from what we buy, to where we travel, to whom we know—we can measure what until quite recently was thought unmeasurable. In the Microeconomics and Social Systems Group at Yahoo! Labs, we are using this proliferation of data to explore how societies function. It’s a fascinating area of study that is just beginning to shed light on new layers of human behavior, making it a perfect fit for the Key Scientific Challenges Program.
In a recent study that’s garnered some attention, for example, we asked, “How eccentric are people?” Looking at consumer preferences across movies, music, and web browsing, we came to the surprising conclusion that ordinary people have pretty extraordinary tastes. In particular, we found that typical Netflix and Yahoo! Music users regularly watch movies and listen to songs that are not even available in the largest brick-and-mortar retailers. This result not only challenges stereotypes about people blindly following the herd, but also highlights the importance of offering consumers broad selection. That is, specialty products may dramatically boost user satisfaction by providing buyers the convenience of “one-stop shopping” for both their mainstream and niche interests.
In other work, we used web search queries to forecast the commercial success of movies, songs, and video games. Weeks, sometime even months, before a movie opens or a video game is released, one can find traces of pent up consumer demand in the search query logs. We found that these telltale signs of early interest are remarkably good predictors of future success. The catch? Although the search logs do reflect user intent, more mundane indicators, such as production budgets and reviewer ratings, perform equally well at forecasting sales. Thus, the benefit of web search as a prediction tool may have less to do with its superiority over other methods than with its generality, low cost, and real-time nature.
At a time when we are drowning in data, at Yahoo! Labs we’re asking a simple question: what can you do with it? The answer is limited only by our imaginations.
Tagged: Data, Key Scientific Challenges, netflix, Sharad Goel, Social Systems, yahoo! labs, yahoo! music
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Posted February 18th, 2010 at 9:41 am by Lucas Mast, Blog Editor
1 Comment » / Filed in: General
We just announced with Microsoft that we have reached clearance for our search agreement, without restrictions, from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission. We’ll now turn our attention to beginning the process of implementing the deal.
Here are some useful links to get more detailed information about today’s developments:
Search Alliance Official Website
Official Press Release
Yahoo! Search Blog
YDN Blog
Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog
Yahoo! Transition Center
Video: Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz discusses Yahoo! & Microsoft’s new Search Alliance: Click here
Video: Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz talks about Yahoo’s continued innovation in search: Click here
Official US DOJ Antitrust Division statement: Click here
We will continue to update Yodel with new information today and throughout the process.
Tagged: alliance, blog, DOJ, EC, european commission, justice, microsoft, search, search alliance, search marketing, transition center, united states, yahoo, ydn, YSM
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Posted February 17th, 2010 at 4:39 pm by Lucas Mast, Blog Editor
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Dibble here…Jerry Yang, Scott Noteboom and I were joined by Governor Dave Heineman of Nebraska, Mayor Douglas Kindig of La Vista, Attorney General Jon Bruning and Nebraska Congressman Lee Terry, and hundreds of guests, as we celebrated the grand opening of Yahoo!’s new state-of-the-art data center in La Vista, Nebraska and our new sales and customer support center in Omaha. We are so grateful to the residents and local businesses in Nebraska with whom we could not have succeeded without their support. Yahoo! serves billions of advertisements each day and services more than 600 million users from around the world each month and this data center is just one of many we’re building that will streamline our efficiency, while helping the planet. Yahoo! thanks Nebraska for being a part of the next phase of growth for the Internet.
David Dibble – EVP Service Engineering & Operations
Tagged: Advertisments, Internet, Nebraska Data Center, Opens, yahoo
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