Yahoo’s bet on the future of the internet
Yahoo! is making a strong bet on the future of the internet becoming a social application. They realize that people don’t care so much about search results, as opposed to how these results are delivered. While Google, ms, etc. compete on search, Yahoo is steadily creating/buying a network of application (Buzz, Answers, Flickr, etc.), which use the internet to not only connect people, but use the knowledge of the individuals to produce a synergy, which could potentially be greater than any horizontal search could provide.
But one thing still remains, for Yahoo’s plan to work, they need to commoditize search, the catalyst: Nutch – an open source search engine started by Doug Cutting (creator of Lucene). This project was sponsored by Overture (Yahoo) for a while, but as of January 1st 2006, Yahoo! has hired Doug full-time:
On the first of this year, after four years as an independent contractor, I accepted a full-time job with Yahoo!. This isn’t as big of a change as it sounds. For much of the past four years my work on Nutch had been in-part funded by Yahoo! (and Overture before they were acquired by Yahoo!). I’m still primarily working from home, and, so far, entirely working on open-source stuff: Lucene, Hadoop and Nutch. The biggest change is that I don’t have to draft contracts, submit invoices, etc. I can now instead better focus on the technology and the open-source process.
This is brilliant on Yahoo’s behalf: Make search so widely available (and easy to start up), that eventually thousands of vertical search engines will exist. The trend has already started, tons of vertical search engines have popped up (with venture capital funding), an example krugle.com.
