Yahoo WOO… Forward Thinking, Not a Yanw.
I am a regular reader of Silicon Alley Insider (SAI) and usually love their articles… they certainly play looser with the facts at times than say at the New York Times, and would rather be wrong and apologize later then to be boring, which is why I like them so much, because although they’re often not fully on track, at least they take a great college try at getting into details that other journalists don’t even come close to touching and can admit when they screwed it up and get it wrong.
The writers at SAI have been huge fans of Carol Bartz and the things she is doing in her newfound reign as the lead Yahoo, which is why I was surprised to see them take such a negative view on a recent interview given by the head of Yahoo Search Strategy Prabhakar Raghavan. You can see Prabhakar’s comments for yourself in his own words via the allthingsd video above, but after hearing all the journalists and pundits hammer Yahoo over its lack of innovation in search, I found the comments from Prabhakar to be as dead on accurate as anything I’ve heard in a long time in that industry, and was surprised to see it dismissed by SAI as essentially over-thinking something that is “stupid simple”.
What’s all the fuss about? Well essentially WOO stands for “web of objects”… and quickly and painlessly connecting Yahoo users with the “object” they’re searching for is the focus of much of Yahoo search development efforts according to Mr. Raghavan. The question then becomes what the heck kinda “object” are we talking about here, which is where the whole thing turns a little obtuse.
Well, no worries… the good news is that what IT IS isn’t as important as what IT ISN’T… which is yet another webpage (which in the spirit of Yahoo, we’ll abbreviate as Yanw).
The point being made here is that webpages are very often merely a proxy/replacement for something else, the real thing of interest, and in many instances what someone really wants is something more than yet another webpage. This “more than yet another webpage” is the “object” in question here and could be damn well near anything including digital things like movies or MP3s, or real world things like people, or items like bikes, computers and movie tickets, etc.
Yahoo is simply recognizing that a webpage is often a means to an end and not the end in itself, and is evangelizing its desire to take out the middleman and directly connect their users not with yet another webpage but instead directly with the item their users are really in search of.
When what is being searched for transcends out of the virtual world to the physical one, obviously location awareness of both the searcher and the “object” becomes a huge piece of the equation… and a key component of the future Yahoo search strategy.
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