bobpage.net

I see that http://www.target.com/yahoophotos is live. It’s just a redirect to Yahoo photos - to a special URL, but (currently) without Target branding.
It turns out that Target is going to use Yahoo Photos as a co-branded site. At first I suspect Target stores will promote Yahoo Photos. In the fall you’ll be [...]

I don’t see it on their web site yet, but search engine company X1 today announced an investment of $10 million, lead by USVP. X1 is the search engine that Yahoo! uses as the base for its desktop search product.
I wonder about the future of desktop search. Between Google and Yahoo providing [...]

Today Y! Shopping rolls out a recommendation engine, licensed by ChoiceStream. I checked it out, at Yahoo! Shopping - Gift Finder and randomly tried to find a housewarming present. I got nothing.
Then I looked at the source code for the resulting page, which had lines like:

xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject(”Msxml2.XMLHTTP”);
xmlhttp = [...]

Have you seen the beta of Yahoo! news? Right away you can see it’s a redesign. While it was in alpha, company employees got to test drive it. I looked at it briefly and switched back, but eventually I got used to it and now I love it. It looks a lot more [...]

Oh, Wolf, you funny guy.
It’s about Her Web Site of course.
(news about object relational mapping in the celeb gossip section? oh, the humanity!)

I’ve been meaning to read this profile of Usama in Intelligent Enterprise Magazine. Some good stuff. I particularly liked his favorite quote:

“All models are wrong, some are useful.” - George E. P. Box

Want to play with the beta of Yahoo! 360? Email me and I’ll reply with an invite.

A bit of a buzz today around Om Malik’s How Yahoo Got Its Mojo Back with the attendant lovers and haters commenting along. As is the norm, a lot of the haters (of both Yahoo and Google) don’t know what they are talking about.
I still find it surprising how seemingly intelligent people can march up [...]

Not a lot of blogging lately - not because there’s nothing to talk about, but because I’m up to my eyeballs in resumes and recruiting. (If you can code, and you understand web data, get in touch!)
Regarding Yahoo!’s purchase of Flickr - some random thoughts:

I suspect Flickr will influence Y! more than the other way [...]

I’m one of those guys that runs around thinking people should use the Firefox browser. Many people inside Y! do use it, but they are generally the early adopters. A week or two ago, posters went up around campus announcing an internal test of a new service (no, it’s not Yahoo! 360°). It [...]

I wanted to address another observation given in the article Things That Throw Your Stats. The author makes the statement:

Web analysis is statistics, not accounting.

While I think his overall message is a disservice to the people trying hard to increase accuracy and accountability on the web, I won’t go on about that here. Instead, I [...]

Various news outlets have pointed out that Yahoo! is 10 years old on March 2, and Y! bloggers like Michael Radwin have mentioned some of the festivities. Tonight (supposedly after everyone went home, ha!) the Yahoo! gift fairies descended and distributed, among other things, an oversized commemorative 10-year book.
Throughout the book are facing “WE WERE” [...]

Gartner claims 50% of DW projects will fail due to

I.T. driven, not business driven
data quality issues

One solution? Have a data warehouse competency center.
I’d broaden it to have an analytics competency center. Fortunately, Yahoo! gets it.

On the heels of TiVo’s release of their API, Yahoo! has introduced developer.yahoo.net, a set of services (and SDK) for embedding Yahoo! search into applications. If you’ve used any other search engine SDKs, you’ll be impressed with this one.
There’s a blog too.
Grab your application ID and start hacking…

I was scheduled to hit the red-eye tonight, off to New York to see our good friends at HotJobs and attend the Search Engine Strategies conference. The airline called this afternoon and said the flight was cancelled due to the snow storm in NYC.
I see that Jeremy had an earlier flight. Nice. I booked too [...]