Yahoo goes after more tagging assets, buys del.icio.us
Yahoo continues down the path of more tagging and more collaborative content. Having already purchased Flickr, this morning they’re acquiring del.icio.us (terms undislosed):
From Joshua Schachter at the del.icio.us blog:
We’re proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we’ll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We’re excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team – they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We’re also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)
From Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo Search Blog:
And just like we’ve done with Flickr, we plan to give del.icio.us the resources, support, and room it needs to continue growing the service and community. Finally, don’t be surprised if you see My Web and del.icio.us borrow a few ideas from each other in the future.
From Lisa McMillan, an enthusiastic user of all 3 services (comment on the del.icio.us blog):
Yahoo that’s delicious! I live here. I live in flickr. I live at yahoo. This is insane. You deserve this success dude. Just please g-d don’t let me lose my bookmarks
I’m practically my own search engine. LOL
Tagged bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us can provide a rich source of input data for developing contextual and topical search. The early adopters that have used del.icio.us up to this point are unlikely to bookmark spam or very uninteresting pages, and the aggregate set of bookmarks and tags is likely to expose clustering of links and related tags which can be used to refine search results by improving estimates of user intent. Individuals are becoming their own search engine in a very personal, narrow way, which could be coupled to general purpose search engines such as Yahoo or Google.
I think Google needs to identify resources it can use to incorporate more user feedback into search results. Looking over the users’ shoulders via AdSense is interesting but inadequate on its own because there are a lot of sites that will never be AdSense publishers. Explicit input capturing the user’s intent, whether through tagging, voting, posting, publishing, is a strong indication of relevance and interest by that user. I think the basic Google philosophy of letting the algorithm do everything is much more scalable, but it looks like time to capture more human input into the algorithms.
In a recent post, I pointed out some work at Yahoo on computing conditional search ranking based on user intent. The range of topics on del.icio.us tends to be predictably biased, but for the areas that it covers well, I’d be looking for some opportunities to improve search results based on what humans thought was interesting. As far as I know, Google doesn’t have any assets in this space. Maybe Blogger or Orkut, but those are very noisy inputs.
This seems like a great move by Yahoo on multiple fronts, and I am very interested to see how this plays out.
See also:
- Personalization, Intent, and modifying PageRank calculations
- Five principles of user generated content – Trust, Attention, Relevance, Authority, and Intent
Update 12-12-2005 12:30 PST: No hard numbers, but something like $10-15MM with earnouts looks plausible. More posts, analysis, and reader comments: Om Malik, John Batelle, Paul Kedrosky.
