The new Hertz web site is miles and miles better than the one it replaces. More functionality, easier to find your way around, and it even works in non-IE browsers now.
Not all the bugs are worked out, however:
Month: May 2005
Yahoo! Mindset
You know how you try to do some research on the Web, and when you type in a term on your favorite search engine, you get a ton of links related to buying stuff? Bleh.
Totally randomly, I stumbled across Yahoo! Mindset, a demo from Yahoo Research Labs. It uses machine learning applied to the problem of text classification.
Check it out:
Notice how each search term has a little colored bar that tells you if the link is considered more shopping oriented, or research oriented. And you can twiddle the slider to re-rank the results, without a page reload. Sweet.
There’s a FAQ too.
Oh, My Forehead
Is it just me or does this seem crazy? Perhaps all the auto-resize magic happens in the IE plugin, which is how you can dump 300 vacation photos into your mail all at once. But how about some Firefox love?
Yeah yeah, it’s beta.
On Yahoo! Sponsored Search
David W. Boles apparently prefers Yahoo! Sponsored Search.
I wonder how many people have done a comparison?
Gaining Ground?
I think that Yahoo is definitely gaining ground or maybe has already surpassed Google. Consider this example: Google lists 1 other website on the entire web that links to me. Yahoo lists 422. There’s a link in the Yahoo results that points to a comment I made on another blog just a couple of days ago. Yahoo’s index seems to just be much deeper and more frequently updated.
A pile of April numbers
comScore Media Metrix released a bunch of Web-related numbers today, see
Online Consumers Catch Spring Fever In April.
The results are looking very mature, and show that the Internet and Web are becoming mainstream in people’s lives. What I mean by that is that the big gainers seem to be around seasonal sites, e.g. Mother’s Day, baseball, and career services (for graduates).
Of particular note – they have decided to start tracking photos sites as its own category (although didn’t release any numbers this month). Also, check out the gains to wikipedia, a 40% growth in unique users over March.
Finally, I’d never seen any numbers for the various web mail services, so was surprised to see that for all the noise about Gmail, it had 3.5 million unique users in April, vs. 64 million for Yahoo and 43 million for Hotmail.
The Business Case for Privacy
Forrester released the results of a survey in an report called What’s On Web Analytics Users’ Minds? The report mirrors a lot of the issues we see here at Yahoo! (instrumentation concerns, multiple sources of “truth”, no silver bullet for counting users) but there’s one sentence that jumped out at me – this was regarding privacy concerns:
One-third of online consumers say they’d purchase more over the Internet if they didn’t feel that their privacy was being compromised.
If ever there was a reason to get in front of the online industry’s privacy issues, it’s not the PR value — it’s the economic benefit! It’s one thing to say “we collect information about you” but it’s another to put policies and systems in place that ensure enforcement of data security and engender trust in the marketplace.
I have a feeling that the privacy breaches we’re reading about (and the ones we’re not reading about!) are going to hit fever pitch, and the subsequent government reaction will result in business burdens that at least mirror or even surpass that of Sarbanes-Oxley. Like SOX, it will mean rebuilding our systems. A whole new privacy compliance industry will emerge. I doubt we can do much about it, except to prepare for it. Meanwhile — if raising the level of trust in the marketplace will result in increased sales … why not start now?
The Yahoo! Search FUSE
Check out the John Battelle posting comparing the Yahoo! Search and Google visions and missions.
I particularly liked the Y! Search “FUSE” (for Find, Use, Share, and Expand) – it nicely sums up the attitude at the search team, but also infuses (ha!) a lot of the thinking at Y!.
Authenticating Email
I’m at the point where a quick scan of my spam folder tells me if I want to read anything in it. I may even go days at a time without reading anything, and then just dump the whole folder. I’ve had a few false positives — email that wasn’t spam, but looked it for some reason.
Spam will always be with us, and we’ll always be looking for ways to limit it – and legitimate direct marketing efforts will be looking for ways for their messages to get through. One method gaining popularity is the authentication of email — making sure the From: line is not faked. This doesn’t reduce spam per se but allows recipients to be sure that the sender is really the sender. Since many spammers fake their sending addresses, authentication could cut down on this kind of spam. It would also be another factor in the spam filtering wars.
I see that the the Direct Marketing Association recently announced that they are co-underwriting the upcoming Email Authentication Summit. Yahoo! is also a co-underwriter. Nice to see the DMA involved, and hopefully that will send a signal to all direct marketers that they should learn more about email authentication.