Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service 104
ruphus13 and other readers alerted us to Yahoo's BOSS, Build your Own Search Service. It gives access to Yahoo's entire databases for Web, image, and news search with no cap on queries per day and no restrictions on mixing Yahoo's search results with others or re-sorting them, and without Yahoo branding visible. From their blog announcement: "As anyone who follows the search industry knows, the barriers to successfully building a high quality, web-scale search engine are incredibly high. Doing so requires hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in engineering, sciences and core infrastructure — from crawling and indexing technology to relevancy and machine learning algorithms, to stuff as mundane as data centers, servers and power. Because competing successfully in web search requires an investment of this scale, new players have effectively been prohibited from delivering credible alternatives to Yahoo! and Google. We believe the BOSS platform will begin to change that."
Inktomi for the masses (Score:5, Interesting)
It will be really interesting to learn how all the Inktomi technology works and how it well it was integrated with Yahoo.
Re:BOSS? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds a lot like FOSS. I bet the confusion is intentional, probably a MS/Y! conspiracy to attack Open Source.
Ummm... No. As much as MS would like to see open source dead, this isn't part of it. First off, no one but F/OSS geeks even use the term FOSS, and none of us would confuse BOSS with FOSS. Now if it was something called like, Free Source or something, or something similar to Open Source like MS's Shared Source, it might be taken as an attack, this is just a slightly similar acronym.
Re:Microsoft probably knew. (Score:5, Interesting)
And I thank Jerry Yang's ego very much for that.
Re:Microsoft probably knew. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Microsoft probably knew. (Score:4, Interesting)
the right thing to do for the shareholders
That is an interesting choice of words. You are presenting this opinion as fact where I believe there is room for many other interpretations. There are a lot ways that taking the deal could have been the wrong thing to do.
It was only guaranteed to be the "right thing" if you define the "right thing" as "maximizing short term stock price gains". There are many other ways that the "right thing" could be defined where that deal may or may not have been better. Things like "Maintaining reasonable profit growth for the next 50 years." or even "Providing a work environment that reduces employee attrition". I'm not saying that MS is necessarily bad at these things but a CEO could definitely make a case that the company would be better served by staying independent.
I personally never invest in companies that have a history of making decisions where the "right thing" is defined as "maximizing short term stock price gains". When you do that you're not building anything you're just gambling.
Re:Totally Boss! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Microsoft probably knew. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Really Great Strategy (Score:4, Interesting)
As I read the announcement, running Yahoo ads is not a requirement. Running Yahoo ads will be a future option to those who want to use the ads as a profit stream, but it's up to the site owner to decide.
If you like, you could take your Yahoo search results ad-free and run Google ads next to them. That's why this announcement is so bold - there are basically no requirements or limits on using BOSS.
Ad-Revenue (Score:2, Interesting)
In the end, it is just a move to gain more ad-revenue.
From their Forum:
"Hi -
You can use Boss for mobile as long as it is a search product. Keep in mind though that in the future we will require Ads over a certain query volume a day. Mobile ads may not be available right away, so we'll have to figure that out.
Hope this helps.
-bill"
So basically if you do develop something that a lot of people love, and you receive a load of hits. You will start to see Yahoo adds Pop-Up.
Re:Totally Boss! (Score:2, Interesting)
No Way (Score:3, Interesting)
The shareholders of Yahoo are not there because they're tech visionaries or Yahoo loyalists. That's the point of the Icahn lawsuit. Some may be, but institutional investors hold the bulk of Y! shares that aren't held by corporate officers. Mutual funds, pension funds, etc.
These people hold Yahoo for one reason only: to earn a return on their investment.
Microsoft made an offer that was VERY generous. Not just measured on Y!'s latest performance: Microsoft offered a higher value than Yahoo's stock has seen in years.
Yang and Filo made a deal when they took their company public. The deal is simple: You become a billionaire overnight, making more than the top 1% of the top 1%.
In exchange, you must be a good steward for the people giving you all this money. This is not up for interpretation, debate, or discussion.
There's this thing called "time value of money" that, simply, a dollar today is worth FAR more than the promise of a dollar tomorrow.
You can't say that "shareholder value" is subjective because Yahoo MIGHT turn themselves around and they MIGHT be successful and they MIGHT then be worth more in the future than Microsoft offered today.
No way.
Any shareholder would gladly take that large premium, get cash today, and then re-invest.
It doesn't get any more basic than this. Carl Icahn will probably win this lawsuit. Yang passed the employee-severence-poison-pill in a direct response to Microsoft. He wanted his cake and to eat it, too. He doesn't get to treat Yahoo like his private feifdom. It belongs to its shareholders now.
They don't care about stupid microsoft hating like you do. They don't care about the "purity" of a classic internet brand. They care that they have, say, a pension fund to manage, and they are underwater $20MM on Yahoo shares, and they'd have seen a huge return. That's what they care about.
And the law happens to be on their side.
Re:Microsoft probably knew. (Score:3, Interesting)
Oy Vey.
You are confusing things here. For example:
You start talking about shareholder value. Then you say this: "a CEO could definitely make a case that the company would be better served by staying independent."
This isn't about what would best serve the COMPANY.
It's about what would best serve the shareholders.
Period.
Yahoo has underperformed for years now. Yang has an obligation to the shareholders that made him a billionaire when he decided to go public.
It's not about "short term gains" it's about recouping an investment and giving your shareholders a return. THAT is the covenant you enter-into when you take a company public.
As I mentioned above, this comes down to Time Value of Money.
What PROMISE can you make for tomorrow that will be worth more than cash today?
This is EXACTLY like a company saying that they don't owe you your paycheck. Giving you your paycheck today would only be good for "maximizing short term cash return." If you just forego your salary, the company could "make a case" that they could give you even MORE money later. To heck with the fact that the company has been on a multi-year slide.
You want your cash today. You've earned it. Laws exist to protect employees in these situations. And guess what? Laws exist to protect shareholders, too.
Shareholders are not usually the billionaire couture class.
They're pension funds. Or municipal funds. Or union investors. Or mutual funds. Heath Care trusts. University endowments.
Yang committed himself to protect these peoples investment. He eschewed that responsibility for the same juvenile MS hatred as is witnessed here.
Re:Microsoft probably knew. (Score:3, Interesting)
Long term health of companies is not important. Why do you think it is? What difference does it make if a company exists for 5 years, or 50? As weak companies fail, stronger ones grow from their ashes.
The only purpose of a corporoation is to make money. They're money making machines. They accept money as input into their machine, and the output should be EVEN MORE MONEY. If that is not the output, the machine is broken. Yahoo is broken. It is not producing value. Yahoo owes it to the people who paid to BUILD the machine to get the best deal they can.
This would be moot if Yahoo was performing well. But they're not. Yahoo will never see $35 a share. They have no "game changer" up their sleeve. It was supposed to be their new ad platform. It fizzled.
Re:Totally Boss! (Score:4, Interesting)
This in affect gives Yahoo and the local media players and far more effective search platform and a real market threat to google as well as of course that other major players in the search engine business.
This wider distribution of search engine services will also push search from the current marketing perceived foreground way into the back ground as simply a subsidiary service of any typical major web portal whilst simultaneously pushing local web portals into the foreground in local markets by them being able to offer globally effective search services on their site.