I completely agree that they should be going after blogs and bloggers (especially instead of looking at a billion+ for Facebook). Thing is, they have practically nothing in that area (save for MyBlogLog). I wonder what it would take to acquire SixApart? Technorati?

http://news.yahoo.com/fc

I really liked the interactive stuff you guys had in place to go around the TV. It would be great to see you guys figure out how to integrate tv listings better into search.

I think your comment above points out that many of Yahoo’s problems are intertwined with their lack of tansparency and penchant for secrecy.
They are not a “cluetrain manifesto” company.

Secrecy may have uses, but it also certainly makes early adopters and influencers very nervous.

By the way, as the guy responsible for the Tivo scheduling app–I appreciate the thoughts. You are tracking with how we think about it. Stay tuned for more developments in this area. By the way, the realtime scheduling implementation we just launched with AT&T; Homezone is awesome. I’ll give you a demo sometime if you’re interested.

Yahoo *can* significantly improve search by integrating the various social properties that Yahoo has acquired over the past few years. And perhaps this is all coming and just around the corner, etc. etc., but from the outside, without the benefit of internal visibility the words that it’s coming ring hollow. Yahoo’s super secretive about their plans and why the delay on the integration.

A while back I think it was Stewart who said (I might be wrong on this) that one of the reasons for the delay on image search had to do with the fact that Flickr wanted to give people a way to opt out of having their photos in search. Well we’ve had that now for quite a while and still no meaningful search integration. My own view is that Yahoo lacks the technological expertise to pull it off. But that’s just a guess as again I have no guidance as to what the hold up really is.

Austin. That’s exactly my point about TiVo. You can record shows both at TiVo.com as well as at tv.yahoo.com, but it’s not integrated with *search*. The fact that Britney Spears is going to be on Letterman tonight when you are searching for Britney Spears is a super relevant fact. By better integrating television appearances with celebrities and making easy one step record options from within search you would improve relevancy. Further work should be done with television as well not the least of which is indexing closed caption text for archived shows.

Google’s greater indexing/weighting of blogs is interesting. It’s not every blog of course. They rely on PageRank, but overall it seems to be working. Overall generally well page ranked blogs consistently produce interesting content. When I want to read about search or Google, I’m interested in what John Battelle has to say. When I want to read about Microsoft or videoblogging or Podtech, I’m interested in what Robert Scoble has to say. When I want to read about Yahoo, I’m interested in what Jeremy Zawodny has to say. I think Yahoo needs to do a better job at integrating blog posts, especially from higher linked blogs, into their search results. You may not, but I think this does something to give Google an advantage at present.

While not totally integrated, this functionality already exists. When I go to tv.yahoo.com, there are buttons labeled ‘record to TiVo’ that’ll do just that.

>…highly ranked by Google. Now I’m not
>saying that my article is necessarily
>authoritative…

So why should it be highly ranked? I like reading your blog, but if I’m searching for info on who Gene Scott was, I don’t necessarily want your blog entry about him. I can’t count the number of times when I’ve searched for serious information and can hardly find anything because it’s all buried beneath people’s rants about the subject. I still think Google should have a way to exclude blog entries on request, as many are listed highly in Google’s PageRank just because of reciprocal blogger links.

Oh and another reason Digg gets more expensive with time: the longer they go without getting bought the more VC they have to take to keep it going which reduces the founders share of profit from a future buy-out. Which means that the incentive has to be pretty good for them to sell. Yahoo could still get them though. They’re one of the few companies who have a need and the cash on hand to do it. But if they never integrate then what would be the point?