I Guess Yahoo Has to Go Search

Yesterday, Yahoo bought Right Media for $680M. Clearly, Yahoo is still fighting for that lucrative search pie. But in the meantime, they also lost Andrew Braccia, the VP of consumer web search. Braccia was a crucial figure in bringing in Flickr and del.icio.us, which to me highlights two facts:

• A key search engine executive earned his stripes doing non-search engine stuff
• The search engine executive left

I’m not against Yahoo doing search. I’m not even against them abandoning it for social media. What bothers me is their everything-at-once mentality.

In the 90s, it was about directories, which are about categorization and human interpretation. Then search came along, and it’s about logical results that are pure algorithms. Finally, social media jumped in, and it has everything to do with human bias.

So, of course, I see potential issues with Yahoo trying to make the best search engine possible while trying to claw their way into social media. These two goals involve two totally different types of thinking, which clearly their executives have failed to capitalize on.

Right now, Yahoo has the MySpace bug, which is the disease big companies get when they have all of the “eye balls.” As in, since everybody visits their website, they think they can steal all the related markets. While this is true, unlike real life monopolies, it’s impossible to force consumers to come back to your website. Thus, as you shove all your crappy services down their throat, you inadvertently harm your image and lower the over all quality of your product.

And if people think your product is a “me too”, then you’ll never be as good as whatever it is people think you are trying to become (Google). If Yahoo wants an edge on Google, they should have invested the money that went into Panama (their search engine) and put it into their social properties. They have all of the related sites in place to build an awesome social portal, or they could have even taken a shot at a social search engine of some sort.