Really insightful interview, with some hints / specifics on Yahoo's strategy. A couple of excerpts for you here:
As you can see, long interview, but well worth it if you're interested in vertical search."We currently have 250,000 merchants and 60m products" ... “Looking forward, there will be more focus on personalization and community. Yahoo has 350mm users globally and 150m registered users. We’re making a big bet on community with services like Yahoo! 360. We’ll spend the next 2-4 yrs building out community features and it will factor into the shopping experience."..."Search technology is the key. Inktomi, Altavista, Fast, and Overture have found their way into Yahoo! Shopping. But Yahoo! Shopping is just a 1st generation vertical search platform. Shopping search will come to mean a lot more than just products, but when you’re in shopping mode [no matter what the product or service], you want access to experts, guides, and content. Shopping search 2.0 involves things like wikis and blogs.”"... “There are 2 uniquely qualified companies in the space; Yahoo and Google. In order [for a pure play comparison engine] to get scale, they have to ride the search bandwagon.... “There’s a strong browsing component of the shopping experience. Walmart, Amazon, and pure retailers have done better than aggregators. We’ve done the best on the shopping side. People like browsing because they like the discovery process.” ... “We have an offshore group in Bangalore extracting attributes. But categorization goes beyond the attributes. It’s also about what kind of merchandising elements you have on the site, what kind of graphical media. ... “In the future, we hope to do more merchandising in the soft categories; an area that we have to get better at. We’ll rely on our partners on the merchandising front as they are the experts.”
Comments