I’ve found the folks at Yahoo to have an increasing appetite for new ideas, quite a switch from a few years ago when the company was hunkered down in protect mode, like much of the Valley. They want to grok RSS, blogs, mobile, desktop search – and beyond. Jeff is on fire about where his unit is going, and I have to admit the things he spoke of and showed me, much of which unfortunately I can’t report on yet, were pretty damn cool. Suffice to say Yahoo is continuing and strengthening its approach of driving search results based on intent of the user, and in particular discerning what the “task” is the user is attempting to do, then helping complete that task. Such a focused goal has pretty significant implications for where the company is going next, and how it will handle platforms in general (beyond the web) and commerce in particular. Its integrated approach requires a lot of threading of disparate data feeds into one grand unified experience, and I think after so many years of banging on this problem, Yahoo’s experience is starting to bear some fruit. One example is their recently debuted local search – which incorporates a platform approach that allows users to create reviews and such, another is their product search (which has cool narrowing features – doing that is not as easy as it looks), not to mention their shortcuts.
More to come when I can say more…