By : Nidhi Gupta

Yahoo co-founder David Filo, who rarely gets in front of a conference crowd, chatted with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit, aided by Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo vice president of product strategy. Filo is the product focused half of the founding duo. The other founder, Jerry Yang, focuses on the business issues.

You would think after 12 years in the saddle and with billions of dollars in their accounts, the motivation to keep at it would diminish for the founders, but Filo said that the opportunity that lies ahead keeps him motivated, as well as being part of the “revolution.”

Battelle asked about Microsoft buying Yahoo. “Over 12 years of our history rumors come and go,” he said. On further probing by Battelle, Filo added, “It’s pretty safe to say nothing will be announced tomorrow.”

Dave McClure, from the audience, asked why Yahoo hasn’t acquired Six Apart’s blogging tools or Facebook to gain some faster traction in blogging and social networking. Horowitz responded, “We put Yahoo 360 out there and learned a lot from it. 360 may be doing a 180, and change and adapt to address the opportunities.” He didn’t offer any specifics as to what the 180 degree turn looks like.

Filo added, “We are absolutely interested in blogging, and we hope five years from now to be a major player in that space. We will look at acquisitions.”

Horowitz dealt with the Google question, that Yahoo is slowing down as Google ascends. He admitted that Yahoo has not done a good job on the monetization side. On the other hand, products are growing (Flickr has grown 15x) and are being knit together.

Filo commented on Google, saying Yahoo has never had a shortage of competitors in its history. “The next MySpace or YouTube is just as much a threat as Google,” Filo said. “It’s more important to think about how we evolve as a company. One constant is we know things are going to change and the leader in search five years from now might be google us or some startup.”

Battelle asked about how Google or Microsoft can outspend Yahoo for acquisitions and monetization deals. “Microsoft could outspend us on anything. It’s not going to define our success or failure. In the environment we operate in, we have to build better products and services. We have looked at thousands of companies over years and generally we get the companies we want,” Filo said.

On the new ad monetization engine, Horowitz said that there are a few hundred advertisers are on the system. “We are taking it slowly coming up on the Christmas season and want to make sure we get it right. We are cautious but plan to get advertisers converted over in Q4 and Q1 [2007].”

Source: Blogs.zdnet.com

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By : Nidhi Gupta

For the past six or seven years, one of the most dominant factors in determining page or document placement has been an evaluation of incoming links. Google pioneered the method, known as Pagerank, in its original algorithm and has refined it ever since. The recent flap over Pagerank revaluations might provide SEOs a broader hint at changes happening behind the scenes at Google and other major search engines. While unintended, Google might be signaling a step away from Pagerank as a primary means of recommendation and valuation.

A shift away from link based scoring methods would be an enormous step for Google to make however, looking at the evolution of the Internet, it is a logical step to make. Information transmitted over the Internet is changing rapidly as are user-habits. While it will continue to be a primarily text based medium, today’s Internet infrastructure allows easier access to a multiplicity of file types and formats, many of which are not conducive to the link-loving Google grew up on.

Predictably, user-habits are changing as rapidly as improved technology or interactivity allows them to. Perhaps the most prescient example is the social network revolution currently being fronted by Facebook and MySpace. Internet users are beginning to use their social networks as web-portals, the same way they once used Google and Yahoo!. Social networks are all about linkage however many if not most links found within social networks are useless from a search ranking perspective. These two factors, combined with the anticipated expansion of Google’s reach into the cellular phone market and a few recent patent applications lead me to speculate Google is radically reworking its primary ranking algorithms. Relevance and location are in, links are likely on their way out.

Two Google patents particularly pertaining to the relevance of location are Shared Geo-Located Objects and Ranking and Clustering of Geo-Located Objects. Both outline how Google uses information drawn from various sources, including files shared amongst Google Earth users, to figure out which documents might be most relevant to unique users.

These scoring methods demonstrate a movement away from algorithmic assumptions made through link-analysis, placing greater weight on objective comment from users.

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