SearchEngineUpdate with Vanessa Zamora - 02-26-2008 Part I
Abstract: 1. Yahoo To Open Services To Third Party Publishers, 2. Google Joins Consortium To Build Bandwidth
Vanessa Zamora
Video Content Producer, SearchEngineWorld
7:10 pm on Feb. 26, 2008 (utc 0)
Transcript
Tuesday February 26th, 2008
Yahoo To Open Services To Third Party Publishers
One part of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s three part strategy for turning the Web company around includes opening Yahoo services to third party publishers. To help meet that goal, Yahoo plans to introduce a service called Buzz, a la Digg, that enlists users to help it compile the most popular news items and articles from around the Web. Yahoo has teamed with more than 100 major news sites, including USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, which have agreed to place a Yahoo “Buzz Up” button next to articles and other content, allowing users to vote on what they feel is newsworthy content. Yahoo will combine the top user-rated articles with related information from its Internet search service to determine what articles or which news will be placed, by human editors, on the Yahoo portal front page. Yahoo’s home page receives more than 90 million visitors in the United States each month. Yahoo hopes the buzzworthy news will attract more users and turn Yahoo’s portal front page into a hub for driving traffic to other publishers. Furthermore, Yahoo will open up it’s search platform to 3rd party Web site owners, who will be able to provide additional information about their site going beyond listings that include only a title, a snippet of ad text, and the site’s URL. Web site owners like Yelp and The New York Times can now supply Yahoo with extra site information such as reviews, that Yahoo’s patented Machined Learned Ranking will process to ensure results are presented to users at the right time. Yahoo hopes the open search platform will enable 3rd parties to build and present the next generation of search results.
To help combat increasing Internet bandwidth demands, Google will join a global consortium of six companies set to construct a new subsea cable system called Unity, linking the US and Japan, and providing the capacity to sustain a surge in Internet traffic between the continents. Unity is expected to initially increase Trans Pacific cable capacity by about 20 percent with demand for Trans Pacific bandwidth capacity expected to double roughly every two years. A spokesperson for Unity said, “The Unity cable system allows the members of the consortium to provide the increased capacity needed as more applications and services migrate online, giving users faster and more reliable connectivity.” Unity is expected to be ready for service in the first quarter of 2010 and will cost $300 million to build.
7:10 pm on Feb. 26, 2008 (utc 0)