Marissa Mayer Is Aiming to Bring Search Technology Back to Yahoo (7)
Marissa Mayer Is Aiming to Bring Search Technology Back to Yahoo
Let's hope some more competitors come into the search space ...
from http://recode.net/2014/01/31/with-fa...tech-to-yahoo/
With “Fast Break” and “Curveball,” Mayer Is Aiming to Bring Back Search Tech to Yahoo
January 31, 2014, 11:29 AM PST
By Kara Swisher
According to numerous sources inside Yahoo, CEO Marissa Mayer has ordered up two under-the-radar initiatives — that could potentially get the company back into algorithmic search as well as search advertising.
The internal code names for the efforts — which are not actually being done together, though they are in tandem — are borrowed from sports. In this case, basketball and baseball: Projects Fast Break and Curveball, respectively.
Sources said the plan is being done as part of a contemplation of how Yahoo can accelerate the end of — or actually end — its longterm search and advertising partnership with Microsoft. Currently, Yahoo only has control over the search experience, but Mayer clearly wants more purview over the business.
Fast Break and Curveball involve a number of top Yahoo execs, including Laurie Mann, SVP of search products; Adam Cahan, SVP of mobile and emerging products; and Jay Rossiter, SVP of platforms. (If SVP of ad tech Scott Burke shows, it’s a party — not a fun one exactly, but it is what it is in Sunnyvale these days).
Sources said Mayer has put a priority on the projects — a three- to four-month time frame — which could eventually result in a full search engine, possibly more oriented to mobile than the desktop, where Yahoo once played big.
That makes sense, especially since Yahoo’s share of search has continued to decline. Most recently, according to comScore, it fell to 10.8 percent, down 0.4 percent from November to December in the U.S. market. Meanwhile, Google’s share rose to 67.3 percent and Microsoft to 18.2 percent.
It has been thus since former CEO Carol Bartz got Yahoo out of the search technology business in 2009, in favor of the Microsoft deal that was called the Yahoo & Microsoft Search Alliance. Under the 10-year agreement, Microsoft’s Bing search engine provides the search technology on Yahoo, as well as the search-advertising technology.
It also includes revenue-per-search guarantees, the latest of which is set to expire in March (it could be renewed as before). The income from search has become important to Yahoo, which said in a recent regulatory filing that 31 percent of its revenue came from its search deal, much higher than had previously been thought by investors.
That puts Yahoo in a vulnerable position in terms of controlling its destiny, and it has been an issue with Mayer for a while, who has tried various legal means to exit some of its search commitments with Microsoft.
For example, Yahoo tried and failed to delay the transition of paid search in Taiwan and Hong Kong, via complex legal fighting. As I noted in a post in November about the issue: “In other words, despite leaking all over the place that CEO Marissa Mayer wanted to get out of the search partnership with Microsoft (and she still might want to), Yahoo’s not getting out of the rollout globally. Yet!“
Yet, indeed, Mayer has made no secret internally of her disdain for the deal, despite public utterances supporting it.
In its legal efforts, by the way, Yahoo used the excuse of the Microsoft CEO transition as one of its arguments for the delay. That will soon be fixed, as longtime Microsoft exec Satya Nadella is likely to be taking that job soon.
Interestingly, thanks to a stint at Microsoft’s Online Services division at the time of the initial Yahoo deal, Nadella is very familiar with it and should be able to go toe-to-toe with Mayer, who ran search products — though not the technology — at Google.
Whether she can slip out of the deal will be interesting, as will any efforts to revive search at Yahoo. It has lost a lot of its core team in the area. Here Mayer has tried to bulk up, as well as with its research efforts.
Good stuff cmdeal, I like these articles you post.
Yahoo's been dying since the 90s and should be put to rest. They managed to make all the wrong decisions over the years, which is too bad. The one thing they had that was superior to all others was Yahoo Messenger, and that was in the heyday of the messenger craze, and they failed to transition to social and the other stuff that was developing in the mid-00s.
More recently, Marissa Mayer gave $100M in one year to some guy who was supposed to revamp their search. Just hilarious.
If she had distributed that $100M in STM, Yahoo search toolbar would be on every computer in the US. 
Originally Posted by _mcr_
Portals due to their reach are still really popular with brands. HP take overs from 100k++ per day still ain't an issue.
But fuck me they're archaic businesses. They really haven't changed that much since the 90s and that's the truth, MSN included etc.
Cheers for the post cmdeal.
Thanks for sharing these articles, cmdeal - very interesting indeed!
I wonder what the technology base behind these search efforts is? I'm guessing just another crawler-based engine, but it'd be interesting if at least one of them was trying something new.
Originally Posted by _mcr_
Companies that are cobbled together via acquisitions tend to be highly dysfunctional.
When the list of companies you cobbled together looks like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...tions_by_Yahoo! you can be sure the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing.
Although you can take advantage of this as well.
Just to give an example, one of my acquaintances has been doing about $100K a month buying traffic from one part of Yahoo and selling that back to another part of Yahoo for several years now.
Originally Posted by cmdeal
Originally Posted by _mcr_
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