Yahoo to distrbute its version of Hadoop

Yahoo announced plans Wednesday to release an open-source version of its take on Hadoop, a grid-computing framework used to run many parts of its business.

Yahoo is a major force in the development of Hadoop, which is principally overseen by the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop is essentially an open-source version of the software Google uses to run its Web indexing servers, and Yahoo uses it for much the same purpose internally.

Hadoop runs on tens of thousands of servers inside Yahoo, said Nigel Daley, quality and release engineering manager for Yahoo Grid Technologies, in a blog post Wednesday. That's a much larger implementation than other companies and organizations might wish to deploy, but at the same time they would like to benefit from the reliability tweaks that Yahoo has made to Hadoop in order to support its enormous Web properties.

"This distribution is largely a response to the numerous requests that we have received to share Yahoo!'s internally tested and scale-proven releases," Daley wrote. The code is available for download immediately here on Yahoo's site.

Yahoo! Wants to Power Your Site Search

When CNN launched their new site in June of 2007 they dumped Yahoo! in favor of Google to power their site search on CNN.com. Yahoo! was still used on the international version of the site, however. As I’m based in the US, I don’t often check the CNN International site, but I decided to look today. I’m not sure who is powering the search on the site now, but the Yahoo! logo is gone, so it looks like they dumped Yahoo! there, too. Anecdotally, that seems to be a common trend — I see a lot more “Powered by Google” buttons next to site search boxes than “Powered by Yahoo!” badges.

Google’s Site Search is so easy to plug in, and the resulting user experience is so good, that is has become a mainstay on an ton of sites around the web. Today, Yahoo! announced a revamped site search product that aims to take a bite out of Google’s search marketshare.

Yahoo! Vertical Lens is part of the Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) platform, and allows developers to create site search engines that go beyond Google’s plug’n'play offering. Yahoo!’s launch partner for the initiative is technology blog TechCrunch, who are now using Vertical Lens for their site search.

Among the features that the new product offers are:

* Real-time indexing of proprietary content - When new blog posts or comments are added to the site, the search index updates almost immediately to reflect those changes. (Google is pretty good at keeping on top of site changes as well, so not much new here.)
* Customized ranking - BOSS is all about customizing Yahoo! search results, so Vertical Lens allows sites to find tune the algorithm to fit their audience and user experience.
* Structured search - Maybe the coolest aspect of the new Vertical Lens is that it supports faceted refinement of searches. For TechCrunch, their new search engine allows users to narrow query results by author, number of comments, blog category, or date, for example.
* Blending Web with proprietary content in a single search display - Vertical Lens can search both site and web content and blend results together in a single display.

Yahoo! Vertical Lens is currently only available to partners, but Yahoo!’s YaJie Ying promises that the company is “working to share the technology more openly through the BOSS API.”

Article source: Sitepoint

The Google and Yahoo Marriage Is Dead

Google has backed down from an online advertising marriage with Yahoo amid antitrust concerns raised over the partnership of the number 1 and 2 search providers worldwide. Back in June 2008, Yahoo opted for an alliance with Google, defying cries over a monopoly on the online advertising space from Microsoft and other rivals. Yahoo's measure was first and foremost a tactic designed to keep it out of the grasp of Microsoft, which had made an unsolicited bid to acquire the Internet giant in February 2008.

David Drummond, senior vice president, Google Corporate Development, and chief legal officer, revealed that the Mountain-View search giant continued to believe that the agreement with Yahoo would have been beneficial for all parties involved, even as it was walking away from it. "Why? Because it would have allowed Yahoo! (and its existing publisher partners) to show more relevant ads for queries that currently generate few or no advertisements. Better ads are more useful for users, more efficient for advertisers, and more valuable for publishers," Drummond explained.

Back in June, when the Google and Yahoo partnership was announced, the duo agreed to postpone implementation as long as it took for antitrust regulators to give the agreement a green light. After these four months, Google is walking away from Yahoo, abandoning the online advertising alliance altogether rather than face legal issues.

"However, after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it's clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement. Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners. That wouldn't have been in the long-term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement," Drummond added.

At the debut of the year Microsoft was willing to pay over $30 per share for Yahoo, namely approximately $45 billion. But Yahoo refused the deal and chose to go with Google instead. That unsolicited Microsoft offering must look pretty sweet to Yahoo shareholders right now, as the shares of the Internet giant have dropped to just over $10.

"We're of course disappointed that this deal won't be moving ahead. But we're not going to let the prospect of a lengthy legal battle distract us from our core mission. That would be like trying to drive down the road of innovation with the parking brake on. Google's continued success depends on staying focused on what we do best: creating useful products for our users and partners," Drummond concluded.

Article Source: Softpedia

New Yahoo Developer Tools Coming Tomorrow

Last week Yahoo invited a group of reporters to its Brickhouse offices in San Francisco to discuss its open strategy in general and to announce that a set of new developer tools were coming in the following week.

Well, it’s that following week and we just received word that these tools go live tomorrow morning. Yahoo will provide details at that point in a blog post, but from what we learned last week, we can expect a sandbox for developers to start building social applications (based on the Open Social spec) that can later be placed across Yahoo’s properties.

These properties include My Yahoo, profile pages, and the Yahoo homepage itself, among other locations. There will also be a “data updates” system that pushes social notifications around from website to website (much like Facebook Beacon, except more extensive), as well as an API that lets developers pull Yahoo profile data onto 3rd party sites (much like Facebook Connect).

Article source: Techcrunch

AOL-Yahoo Merger Details Emerge; Deal Could Happen This Month

Yahoo is continuing its marathon merger discussions with AOL, sources close to the negotiations have whispered to us, and a deal could happen as early as this month. Is this just a rehash of the reported discussions in February and then again in April?

Yes and no. It’s clear that AOL’s parent company, Time Warner, wants this deal more than ever. What isn’t clear is whether AOL’s assets will fix any of Yahoo’s problems.

The deal structure that is currently being discussed is Yahoo’s acquisition of AOL (content, services and advertising), minus their subscription dial up business. That plus a couple of billion dollars in cash from Time Warner gets them approximately a third of the combined entity. Time Warner’s AOL headache is gone, and they have a stake in the world’s most valuable chess piece in the Google/Microsoft search and advertising war.

Factors favoring a deal: the companies believe Yahoo’s advertising platform would monetize AOL assets far beyond what they’re generating today (a little over $2.4 billion annually). And those against: combined dominance in mail (they’d have 48% of all worldwide email accounts according to Comscore, with Microsoft #2 at 42%) and instant messaging (39% worldwide combined market share, compared to 55% for Microsoft). In reality, though, email and instant messaging market share are only a problem if Microsoft then comes in and buys the combined entity.

Yahoo gets to make a case to stockholders that they dominate the online portal/services/content world, and who cares if they outsource search advertising to Google. Our position is that they can’t succeed in the long run without strong and competitive search advertising, although it may take the Department of Justice to get that message through to Yahoo’s executive team. Even after these entities combine, if they do, Yahoo still has a major long term competitive problem on its hands.

Article source: Techcrunch