Supernova 2007: because technology is everyone's business

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Perspective: Usama Fayyad, Yahoo!

Usama Fayyad, Chief Data Officer and Sr. VP, , answers the question: What research needs to take place to build the future of the Web?

He talked about the Yahoo! Research vision to be the place where the Internet’s future is invented. They achieve scientific excellence by recruiting some of the most talented scientist in the world and having an open model, aggressively publish o get the peer reviews.

Fayyad talked about the types of research they do, including how they developed algorithms for auctioning search keywords. The systems enables advertisers to bid on search keywords by starting with the minimum possible bid. The model in use today is to have the highest bidder win, but pay the second highest price, based on the theory that the winner feels they paid too much. If you do it scientifically, you discard that model.

To learn the impact of brand metrics, Yahoo! looked at measures of brand lift: brand awareness, brand favorability, purchase intent. If you were exposed to a brand ad the week before a search, you’re 100% more likely to click on a sponsored link. He says you have to think holistically, about the interactions of the media experience, to create more impact through advertising opportunities.

The problem of how do you right an algorithm that can figure out what photos when they all have the same name, like jaguar (car, cat, etc.). When people tag their photos, the solve that problem. Yahoo! Is researching how social media can be leveraged to solve problems in search.

For example, lets people agree on tags, then use them to share and organize collections. This makes it easy to tag photos, so the user doesn’t have to make the decision. He demonstrated a camera phone that knows where it is, so when you take a photo, it lists options on how to tag the phone. It suggests tags based on how popular tags are in that area. You can click a tag to add photos from others collections.

Tags that have to do with geographic location can be generated on mobile apps, like your mobile phone. If you take a photo with a digital camera, you can tie in to your calendar so it knows where you were on the date the photo was taken.

Fayyad says we’re at a primitive stage of development of search technology. In the future, if you’re browsing, there may be a predictive feature based on your online activities. The use of personalization will change things. Soon there may be no distinction between sponsored and organic search, because the predictive model will know if you’re looking for a business.