When you think open-source, Yahoo's probably not the first company that pops to mind.
But that's effectively the route Yahoo's taken in partially opening its search network to third-party developers, à la Facebook or Apple's iPhone. The initiative, which it calls Build Your Own Search, or BOSS, is an attempt to demonstrate thought leadership and new sources of revenue. (Not to nitpick, but maybe some crafty developer could get them started with an acronym spellcheck function.)
Yahoo's entering a crowded market for enterprise search. Vendors like Autonomy, FAST (acquired by Microsoft in January), and Google (naturally) have been slugging it out for a couple years now in a nascent market already valued at more than $1.4 billion.
The cynical among you will be quick to point out that Yahoo's doing this to:
Make itself more attractive to Microsoft again
Contradict Carl Icahn's charges of incompetence and lack of innovation
Distract investors from the nasty reality of today's market and a lumbering share price
And all that may be true. But it's also true that Yahoo's making an actual overture to enterprise buyers, in a part of the data management market that's active and bearing fruit for suppliers. What Yahoo really needs, as multiple analysts have pointed out, is a high-profile partner to help with this BOSS effort and to stem erosion of Yahoo's market share in the search space.
The dynamics at work here -- a well-funded company with good brand recognition struggles to assert itself in an online market that should be a slamdunk -- mirror Microsoft's issues almost exactly. And that would seem to build the case for Microsoft acquiring Yahoo. But a budding area of the enterprise search market that rides the coattails of open source is not enough to justify a $30+ billion expenditure. More likely, BOSS is a minor skirmish in what's looking to be a very protracted and messy acquisition battle that will only benefit third parties like Icahn.
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Enterprise search is an interesting issue. I am not an expert particuarly on this realm, but I may try to tell you what I think. (This is ThinkerNet, isn't it? ;-))
You have raise two typical examples---Facebook vs. IBM. Please allow my summarizing it.
The Facebook-style enterprise search model is engaged social search. It is a combined force of both humans (unique individual experiences) and machines (traditional keyword-based plus the new semantics-based). This is a great model. But the problem is the lack of successful experiences. Social search is still at its early stage. You can see that many new startups are focusing on this field and even Google has claimed that social search is its next goal. But nobody has really succeeded in realizing it yet. But I would recommend this model because it represents the future.
The IBM-style enterprise search model is somehow traditional. As you said, it related to many scalability and security issues. But it is still a capable model is the size of your targeting market is fixed and limited. Otherwise, I don't think it to be a suitable approach for generic enterprise search solution.
Are there other models beyond the two? I believe so. I would suggest that you think of the problem simultaneously from two directions---enterprises and searchers. A real cutting-edge enterprise search engine may need to engage the force from both sides but not only one side. Apparantly the Faceboo-style emphasizes on the seacher side collaboration, and the IBM-style emphasizes on the enterprise side information management. But how about other factors such as the enterprise side collaboration and searcher side information management? There are many interesting thoughts we may explore.
It is probably too much and to diverse to share in a comment. Please feel free drop me a line and we may have more detailed discussion if you are interested in this topic. yihongd@gmail.com
I have some other questions regarding the business scale of the enterprise search. Two types of companies come to my mind when I think about the Enterprise Search. First group has companies/ businesses like Facebook, second group has companies like IBM.
Facebook can use search engine to recommend interesting things for its users ( based on the past activity of the users or their interests etc) but the requirement here is not a full fledge search engine . What do you say??
IBM can have a lot of data on its intranet so much so that two groups across the globe may be working on the related thing but it "may" be the case that both the groups do not have access to other groups' resources. ( IBM is just an example I am citing due to its huge size, they may have very effective search facilities on their intranet). If this is the case whether companies will like thid party companies to control the advertisements is the first question for me.
In short, I am a bit confused about the business model for the enterprise search.
Currently it is still hard to tell exactly how big Yahoo is going to open. I hope Yahoo will open big. But as I said, it is a double-edged sword.
By the same reason, though Google certainly can do the same thing, but Google won't, at least now. This new model funamentally contradicts to the present Google business model. It will be very risky if Google makes open source in this way as Yahoo at present.
The reason that Yahoo does this way is only because Yahoo has not other choices. If Yahoo still does not make a few major changes, it is dying anyway.
But Yahoo wasn't the first one to offer this, why is it going to change the search-open-source? It's still too early to tell but apart from Google and Microsoft (as mentioned above), Wikia Search is also going after open-source way.
Google is not going to be defeated in one day. And more possibly, Google is not going to be eventually "defeated" at all. But Google will not be so dominating as it is at present.
Yahoo's strategy opens a door, through which it is the crowd of wisdom.
In fact, if Yahoo may eventually open up its platform so broad that everybody can easily set up a good small search engine for himself, the importance of Google will be significantly decreased. People will go for Google only when their answers cannot be self-solved.
When the Web evolves to such a stage, it is a very different one from the current Web we see.
I agree with you that the amount of search engines isn't a factor here. Beyond the second or third one, the rest is just struggling (and that's assuming that MS and Yahoo aren't losing money)
I'm still not convinced that Yahoo thinks they can make it on their own or if they are just trying to create more value to appeal to MS. We'll have to wait for their shareholders meeting in August.
"Is Yahoo still attractive to Microsoft?"
Yes, at least for what Microsoft could offer, but apparently not attractive enough to be worth what Yahoo was after. Yahoo's board obviously thought the company was worth more than the offer from MS. BOSS may help make Yahoo more attractive but only if it works.
"Is MicroHoo still possible?"
I think that may depend on the outcome of Yahoo's annual meeting scheduled next month. Anything is still possible, but I don't think the deal would be the same if it ever went through.
From what I understand, the BOSS strategy is actually supposed to bring more competitions into the search engine market that would not just impact their rivals (at least they hope) but also Yahoo themselves. An upside for Yahoo would be that BOSS will allow them some control over the ads at the search engine sites (the "ants") that participate in the BOSS program (Who's the boss now!!). But does Yahoo really know what they're doing? I doubt it, and so do some of their shareholders as it seems.
I thought Microsoft has stopped looking in Yahoo's direction. Is MicroHoo still possible? Yahoo should really know what they want and how much they really worth. They need more than a BOSS strategy to remain competitive and viable on the market.
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