Yahoo!'s edge?

'Isn't Smaller Just Better?' asks Christian Mayaud.  Barb at geeked.org posted:

Yahoo and Google are having a pissing contest. If only they had more women engineers to clue them in that size doesn’t matter nearly as much as how frequently you can deliver the best results. 

Size isn't the key, but leveraging the wisdom of your crowd of users may be. Over at tecznotes, Mike posts a recent Vox Delicii snapshot and asks questions about del.icio.us posting trends and the role of del.icio.us users who bookmark helpful/timely URLs (as evidenced by others subsequently bookmarking those URLs): is del.icio.us 'being used as a meta-bookmarking service' and are 'highly-popular bookmarks … themselves pointers to the real content'; are CollaborativeRank's "helpful users" helpful 'because they are quick on the draw, or because other users look to them for interesting places'?

It's the leveraging power of community bookmarking services that's now proving so useful to end-users: 'I end up checking Y!MyWeb2.0 each morning to see what links i should read' (Danah). Where does this leave search-engines? Kevin Kelleher has a good article in TheStreet.com (15 August), 'Yahoo!'s Brainpower'. Highlights:

… it's far too early to write off Yahoo!, which has been steadily, if quietly, building a stable of brilliant researchers on its own. Under the leadership of Usama Fayad, Yahoo!'s chief data officer, the company has brought in its share of intellectual caliber, most recently in the hiring of Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research, as well as a research partnership announced with the University of California, Berkeley.   

So, with all of the Google hype, why would any brainiac go work for Yahoo!? Raghavan and others at Yahoo! offer two compelling reasons: First, Yahoo! has the Rosetta Stone of online customer data. For 10 years, it's collected the daily search, email, financial and entertainment habits of users, which number in the hundreds of millions today. And second, by extension, that data open up a lot of areas of research beyond search -- including fast-developing areas such as social networking, user interface and data mining.

"There's no bigger collection of data on this planet. We're collecting 10 terabytes of data a day, and that doesn't include Web pages and 'html' content, which may be the primary focus of someone at Google," says Raghavan, a research veteran from Verity and IBM. Raghavan is also a Stanford consulting professor and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery.

"There's a tremendous opportunity here to address the mass consumer that has never really happened before in history," he says. "We get to study data and networking effects that show how people catch on to trends. And we get to study how to monetize all this, so there's an economic angle as well."

So, while Google workers may be feasting on arugula with dried apricots and capelin pesto, Yahoo!'s researchers are pigging out on deep data showing how online communities are built, how consumers open themselves to the long tail of entertainment niches and why sensible people would create and publish content without being paid a cent for it. Those questions are tightly woven with search technology, but extend well beyond it. …

In a nondescript office building in downtown Berkeley, a quarter-mile from the outskirts of the University of California, Yahoo! is starting an experiment that may have a significant impact on its future strategy. It's partnered with Professor Marc Davis, who came to Berkeley from MIT's pioneering Media Lab, to collaborate on work that Davis began in his Garage Cinema project. … Davis is already working closely with Yahoo! properties like Flickr, one of the earliest success stories in social networking. From a research standpoint, Flickr is something of a puzzle: How did a photo-sharing site develop a fiercely loyal community around it when Friendster, with all of its money and deep finance, couldn't? By watching how Flickr's community functions and grows, Davis can try to tackle an even bigger question: How can Flickr's niche-community DNA be replicated on a vastly larger scale -- say a community of 200 million global users? Yahoo! is betting research will help it create such a community, not simply react to them after they are built elsewhere.

Barb posted (socialsoftwareweblog) about her social bookmark wish-list. I commented there (#2) and referred to Ian Davis' idea of integrating into Google searches a user's RSS feed of his/her bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc). But this is still pretty much the "lonely user" model of search. Yahoo! is well set up to make searching much more of a collaborative affair.

I stumbled across the piece from TheStreet via Thomas' Off the Top feed, where his del.icio.us links for 15 August can be found. Subscribing to a number of del.icio.us user feeds has proved invaluable to me for many months, part of a wider conversation of which "traditional" searches now seem just a part.