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i’m really digging the yahoo’s approach to the web. their recent hire from amazon, Larry Tesler, was definitely a good one.
this is yahoo’s new homepage. it’s clean & intelligently designed. the page layout is wider; a larger search bar, with yahoo! answers weaved into the search bar; an effective use of ajax to make the site more interactive (scroll over the mail or messenger on the sidebar as an example).
a quick note on yahoo! answers:
update: greg does a nice bootstrap analysis on yahoo! answers here. . .
i love yahoo’s approach to the web. their strategy of weaving in human intelligence to add meaning and context to the web is, i feel, the right approach. while google struggles to solve turing, yahoo uses the collective intelligence of the human race to add meaning and context and, subsequently, circumvents turing altogether. a snippet on yahoo! answers from reuters:
On Monday, Yahoo Inc. takes the next step to realize its vision of combining human advice with machine automation to offer more relevant ways of searching the Web.
It is using the millions of human suggestions from its recently introduced Yahoo Answers to complement the mathematically organized features of its core search system.
“It’s the right time now to augment Web search results with some human touch,” said Tim Mayer, Yahoo’s product manager for Web search. “We are making search better by allowing users to tap into the collective knowledge of other people.”
. . . Yahoo Answers, an online site where people can ask and have other Yahoo users answer questions, has grown to store nearly 11 million answers related to technical matters or everyday life in more than 800 categories, the company said.
The service has more than 7.2 million users, Yahoo said, citing data from market research firm comScore Networks Inc.
The Sunnyvale, California-based company said it is now weaving Yahoo Answers into its core Yahoo Search system.
Yahoo Answers, which the Internet media company introduced in December in trial mode, is designed to allow users to ask questions on the Web in plain language. “A lot of people find it difficult to formulate how to come up with the right query,” Mayer said. “Yahoo Answers let others answer that question.”
“This is the actually taking advantage of the enormous power of the Yahoo community,” Gartner analyst Alan Weiner said. Yahoo has an audience of more than 400 million users across its network of sites.
back to the new yahoo! homepage:
other important changes include a “personal assistant,” which is a preview area that displays recent emails, an online “friends list” from yahoo! im, traffic, weather, and yahoo! pulse: “a window to the attention stream of our estimated half-billion users.”
screen shot of the new yahoo! homepage:
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