I wasn’t in the room but I watched a webcast of Yahoo CMO Elisa Steele’s keynote at the IAB Mixx conference this morning from New York. She introduced the new Yahoo Search but spent more time on the new $100 million (or so) ad campaign: “It’s Y!ou.” Danny live blogged the It’s Y!ou talk by Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, which also addressed a wide range of other issues.

On the whole I’d have to say the earlier Steele speech was unimpressive and too familiar sounding. Maybe it’s because they’ve been previewing the messaging informally for some time. And maybe because the themes and creative of the new campaign — though impressively polished — are much like the old and unsuccessful “Life Engine” campaign of 2004. But there were also too many cliches and platitudes in the speech and it was delivered without convincing passion. The word “passion” was used repeatedly but not equally evident from the podium or in the audience as Steele spoke to a largely unresponsive group of advertisers and agencies.

One of the major themes of the talk and new campaign is that Yahoo will help you “navigate life.” Steele rejected the distinction between online and offline: “the Web and your world are inseparable.” In parallel there was a discussion of Yahoo’s reach across the three screens: PC, mobile and TV accordingly. There was a lot of emphasis on communications but also on the new Yahoo homepage as evidence of this new personalized approach — a dashboard of sorts to help organize the internet.

I’m sure there have been numerous consumer focus groups leading up to the new campaign. And while many people would argue the $100 million (or more) would be better spent on engineers, I’m not going to deny that advertising helps shape perceptions. Yahoo’s got a stronger and “friendlier” consumer brand than AOL, Microsoft and maybe even Google at this point. So the campaign dollars may be well spent in maintaining that image.

Apple spends hugely on advertising and marketing to support a brand perception in the market, at a company level and on the level of specific products. However Apple’s products deliver and fulfill the messaging. Here that’s not the case to the same degree.

The challenge and the problem is that Yahoo sites and services must actually fulfill the promise of helping people organize and navigate all the information out there. People are overwhelmed by information overload and “the paradox of choice.” They do need trusted sources, they do need simplification, they do need assistance. But I’m not sure that Yahoo delivers as promised.

Yahoo has lots of reach and lots of top traffic destinations: news, sports, mail, finance, etc. But Yahoo needs to actually create best of class tools and it needs to find simple ways to help consumers integrate all the information coming at them. The homepage is a good start, but it’s not enough. Search Pad is useful but not the “kick ass” product it needs to be to really set Yahoo apart.

There is a disconnect between right-sounding rhetoric and the reality of Yahoo today. I hope that the company can close the gap and be the personalized destination that it aspires to be.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the new consumer-facing Yahoo branding campaign is starting to appear in New York, with a personalization theme: It’s You!. According to the article:

Yahoo is planning to reintroduce its battered brand to the public Tuesday with a massive global marketing campaign, according to people familiar with the effort.

The Internet company’s new tagline, according to one of those people: “It’s You!”

The Y in the “You” is the Y from “Yahoo,” and the famous Yahoo exclamation point will pop up too, this person said . . . The global campaign is focused on personalization and how Yahoo can help people navigate all their services and information online.

In the past, Yahoo has run numerous ad campaigns promoting individual services or the company as a whole. The “It’s You!” campaign sounds quite similar to 2004’s “Life Engine” campaign. At the time the press release announcing the latter effort said:

“Our goal is to showcase the multi-dimensional nature of our brand and reinforce how Yahoo! impacts the lives of its users every single day,” said Cammie Dunaway, chief marketing officer, Yahoo!. “One great way to express the idea of consumer impact is to hear it directly from and feature those people who use our ‘Life Engine’ every day.”

I don’t think I’d agree with the WSJ characterization that Yahoo’s brand is “battered,” but it’s not as hip/cool/lustrous as it once was. AOL faces the nearly identical challenge. Facebook, although not a portal, has taken the place of these portals for many people.

There’s always a question about whether advertising can change behavior. Certainly it can generate awareness. But Yahoo’s past efforts to promote its search engine failed to affect market share. The same was true with Ask’s commercials as well. Still there may be an opportunity to reintroduce the Yahoo brand as a way to help organize your life online.

If I were in the CMO role now occupied by Elisa Steele I would also emphasize Yahoo as a trusted source of information. The internet is increasingly noisy and chaotic and there are only a few sites that truly can lay claim to being trustworthy. Yahoo is one of them.

Yahoo appears to be readying an English-language version of its Yahoo Meme microblogging platform. When visiting meme.yahoo.com from my U.S. location, I’m redirected to an English-language version of the service. There are two versions of this home page: one specifically mentions that the service is coming soon, and both include an email form that appears to allow you to request an invite.

A Portuguese version of Yahoo Meme was launched earlier this year, and Yahoo followed that up with a Spanish version last month (see Yahoo’s Social Plan: Twitter, Twitter, & More Twitter?). The bottom of the English-language home page has a drop-down menu to switch to either of those versions. The service is described as being similar to Twitter with its short posts, the ability to repost messages from other users, and the ability to share photos and video.

Yahoo has been very quiet overall about Meme and what it has in store for the service. We have an email in to Yahoo asking for more details. We’ll update this post if and when we learn more.

Postscript: Yahoo shared this statement with us about Yahoo Meme: “Yahoo! is experimenting with an invitation-only communications tool in select languages and markets for people who want to quickly and easily share interesting content, including multi-media. Global product innovation is important to Yahoo! and we continuously test various products and services in many local markets to gain valuable feedback and insights from consumers. We will share additional details about this product if and when we launch it publicly.”

(found via TechCrunch)

Yesterday on the Yahoo Q2 earnings call, CEO Carol Bartz spent time talking about local and small business (SMB) advertising. She said that these overlapping segments were increasingly important to Yahoo and she announced a new deal with AT&T (to sell display ads on Yahoo to SMBs). She added that between AT&T’s yellow pages sales force and the company’s newspaper consortium partners Yahoo effectively had “13,000 sales reps” in local markets around the US.

Here’s the relevant verbatim Bartz quote from the earnings call transcript:

We also know that local relevance of both content and advertising is increasingly important to our users and capturing more of the local ad market is a big focus to us. To this end, we have announced today that we have expanded our relationship with AT&T to include the reselling of Yahoo! display ad inventory by AT&T’s advertising sales force. Grouped with our strategic newspaper consortium partnership we now have a local sales force 13,000 reps strong. These relationships extend our reach into the fast growing local online advertiser segment.

Given all that it was a surprise to me to see a report on peHUB asserting that Yahoo was seeking a buyer for both HotJobs and Yahoo Small Business:

Now, peHUB has learned from multiple sources that as part of Bartz’s drive to dismantle non-core assets, Yahoo is also trying to shed both HotJobs, which Yahoo acquired for $436 million in cash and stock back in 2001, and Yahoo Small Business, which helps customers get their small businesses online by providing them with everything from domain registration to site monitoring to promotional tools.

On the subject of small business, beyond the remarks above, Bartz also highlighted the Yahoo-Bank of America small business answers center:

[L]arge advertisers such as Bank of America come to us because of our leading sites and large reach. We are partnering with B of A to promote its small business answer center. The center is integrated with our popular social assets such as Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Group to capture user engagement. It is promoted across our network through related search and display ads.

Yahoo Small Business is one of the biggest — if not the biggest — webhosting entities in the SMB market. I don’t know its precise economics, but it generates fees revenue and also serves as a marketing channel to the SMB marketplace:

In addition, Yahoo recently launched a partnership with AdReady that allows SMBs to create self-service display ads that run on the Yahoo network. This doesn’t seem like a company ready to abandon its small business assets as “non-core.” Still it could be true.

I’ve always believed that Yahoo has not fully exploited Small Business as a channel and maybe they want to be out of the hosting and domain registration business. Perhaps the company feels that others are better suited to sell and create the ads that will simply run on the Yahoo network and through the APT platform.

I might be more inclined to believe that HotJobs is for sale. However HotJobs was the basis and cornerstone for the newspaper consortium that Yahoo regards as strategic. That consortium has now moved well beyond HotJobs, but recruitment remains one of three relatively large (though declining) classifieds categories for newspapers. It would certainly raise lots of eyebrows among consortium newspaper execs if the HotJobs property were sold.

Yahoo is trying to control expenses, shed groups and properties that are not strategic and invest where the most value is to be found. However, given Bartz’s remarks about the importance of local and small business advertising and its newspaper consortium, it’s very strange that Yahoo would be selling these two properties.

Yahoo has added a few new tools to its BOSS platform that the company says will give developers more insight to their search results and help build unique search experiences.

The new tools include:

• Integration with Delicious content – end-users can get Delicious saves, top tags, and count information within their search results
• Advanced language capabilities – developers can now filter specific language results for a given market. BOSS now supports Czech, Hungarian, and traditional Chinese
• New sorting functionality – BOSS News service can now sort by date and/or a specified time range in days, weeks, or hours

Yahoo’s announcement has more information about all three tools, including a few code examples.

Yahoo is making a move onto television screens with the Yahoo Widget Engine (YWE), but its first iteration won’t include a Yahoo search box.

The Yahoo widgets are Internet-based applications that can be used on Internet-connected TVs and controlled with the TV’s remote control. Samsung has just introduced a TV that integrates the Yahoo Widget Engine; Sony, LG Electronics, and Vizio will soon launch TVs that support it, too.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the initial version of YWE will be preloaded with widgets for Flickr, Yahoo News, Yahoo Weather, and Yahoo Finance. Additional widgets — like Twitter, USA Today Sports, and sudoku — will be available in a widget gallery.

But despite Yahoo’s need to gain search market share, there’s no Yahoo Search widget. Yahoo spokesperson Lucas Mast tells me that “there will be updates and iterations over time and search is one of the items that will be under consideration.”

The WSJ article says Yahoo expects to offer about 100 widgets by the end of the year.

Below is a photo of the Flickr widget as seen in the WSJ article. Read the article for additional images and video.

FareChase, Yahoo’s discount travel search engine, is shutting its doors today. An alert on the FareChase web site indicates that today is the service’s final day, and encourages users to instead use Yahoo Travel.

In her first conference call back in January, new CEO Carol Bartz said “everything’s open for examination” when it comes to streamlining operations and improving the bottom line.

Yahoo gave this statement to Search Engine Land:

“After careful consideration, Yahoo! is discontinuing FareChase, a travel metasearch engine, effective March 25, 2009. After this date, users will no longer have access to FareChase to compare travel prices, but can continue to shop for and book flights, hotels, cars, cruises and vacation packages through Yahoo! Travel and its partners.

“Yahoo! continues to align resources to focus on core strategic priorities and deliver superior user experiences on the Internet. Discontinuing FareChase will allow Yahoo! to focus our efforts on other key features for Yahoo! Travel, such as Yahoo! Travel Guides and Yahoo! Trip Planner.”

Yahoo bought FareChase in 2004, and in recent years had taken noticeable steps to give the service more exposure. They added it to the Yahoo Travel home page in early 2008, and even featured it as a the travel shortcut in Yahoo’s main search results:

The article, Hadoop, a Free Software Program, Finds Uses Beyond Search, explains the very interesting history behind Hadoop. What is Hadoop? It’s distributed computing software that enables data mining and analysis on a huge scale. It also, apparently, is an open-source version of proprietary software developed by Google to process and analyze massive volumes of data for search. Here’s how the NY Times explains the problem Google was addressing:

By 2003, Google found it increasingly difficult to ingest and index the entire Internet on a regular basis. Adding to these woes, Google lacked a relatively easy to use means of analyzing its vast stores of information to figure out the quality of search results and how people behaved across its numerous online services.

To address those issues, a pair of Google engineers invented a technology called MapReduce that, when paired with the intricate file management technology the company uses to index and catalog the Web, solved the problem.

The MapReduce technology makes it possible to break large sets of data into little chunks, spread that information across thousands of computers, ask the computers questions and receive cohesive answers. Google rewrote its entire search index system to take advantage of MapReduce’s ability to analyze all of this information and its ability to keep complex jobs working even when lots of computers die.

MapReduce represented a couple of breakthroughs. The technology has allowed Google’s search software to run faster on cheaper, less-reliable computers, which means lower capital costs. In addition, it makes manipulating the data Google collects so much easier that more engineers can hunt for secrets about how people use the company’s technology instead of worrying about keeping computers up and running.

Hadoop was developed as something of an open-source response to MapReduce by Doug Cutting, who was later hired by Yahoo. Yahoo then spent millions, according to the article, to further develop Hadoop. Other internet giants and companies such as Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Autodesk, have used Hadoop extensively to analyze huge volumes of data in ways that extend far beyond search.

Now former employees of Google, Yahoo and Facebook have come together to launch Cloudera to deliver data analysis around Hadoop:

“What if Google decided to sell the ability to do amazing things with data instead of selling advertising?” Mr. Hammerbacher asked.

The company has just released its own version of Hadoop. The software remains free, but Cloudera hopes to make money selling support and consulting services for the software. It has only a few customers, but it wants to attract biotech, oil and gas, retail and insurance customers to the idea of making more out of their information for less.

This is data mining on a gigantic scale, taking Google’s original techniques, as translated by Hadoop, and seeking to bring them the masses (of enterprises that is).

Yahoo hosted Hack Day this weekend, the Yahoo Yodel Anecdotal blog has four blog posts on the event:

• The hackers are back
• “6 PM Food, Beer & Games”
• Talkin’ about Girl Talk
• Highlights from Open Hack Day

The event looked incredibly fun! I just wanted to highlight the demo’s that took place that involved search. I might be missing some, so make sure to check out the complete list, if you don’t want to miss any.

#6, The Wobbly Wheel:

In the past 24 hours, we tried to change the classical view of shopping on the web. We implemented in page product comparison, and a universal shopping cart. We used the Yahoo Kelkoo shopping services, along with our own apis.

#7, Microformats and the future

Hack Does: Shows a glimps into the future where microformats are ubiquitous. APIs: Yahoo Boss Yahoo Tech: Yahoo Music Player Tech: PHP, Drupal, Mootools Needs: I have no special needs

#9, Skill Tag Hack

What it does: Improve internal communications. Pulls list of employees at each location, allows users to sort based on location or skills tags to get a better idea of who is in charge of what. APIs: Flickr, Maps, Patterns. Languages: PHP, HTML, CSS,

#16, Siffd

Searching Upcoming with YQL; working on sharing with e-mail and IM.

#19, Y!bqty

A showcase of integration between Yahoo APIs and Mozilla Ubiquity. Ubiquity plugins are written in pure Javascript and we made use of the FUEL library in FF3. APIs used in our Ubiquity commands: Yahoo Music, Yahoo Finance. We also played around with BOSS

#20, Search your own search results with BOSS

Search your own search results with BOSS

#22, OpenDNS Guide

Replaced Yahoo YDN with Yahoo BOSS to provide better search results and a better search experience to our end users. Converted internal APIs to JSON. Need to run demo on own computer due to VPN/internal resources.

#23, Find And Seek

This hack allows Yahoo! users to create and play Scavenger hunts based on Flickr images. The app itself is embedded in the Yahoo Application Platform so we make use of YML and the new Social API. Additionally, we obtain location information through Maps.

#26, SnackUpon

Get StumbleUpon-like behavior trained automatically from your own tags in delicious. Sources are BOSS news and web search, your Delicious network, recent Delicious posts, and your own recent posts.

#31, DarwinPorts RDFa

Mat Caughron with phenomenal advice from Paul Tarjan comments: SearchMonkey app: added microformats (RDFa) for port file web pages that are descriptions of open source software packages ported to MacOS. This makes the ports much more indexable by search engines.

More details can be found at http://developer.yahoo.net/hackday/2008/09/hack_day_demo_list.html.

Yahoo’s relatively new CTO Ari Balogh expanded upon Yahoo’s “open” initiatives in a keynote speech to the Web2.0 conference yesterday. There’s a very extensive discussion, including a video of the keynote, on the TechCrunch site (additional coverage in Search Engine Journal). The SearchMonkey beta is the first step in executing on the strategy, which will roll out in increments over the next several months.

The “OS” part is not “operating system” but “open strategy.” Beyond openness, the themes of Balogh’s talk were making Yahoo more social, more consistent and unified, more personal, and even more “portable.”

Rather than creating another social network, Yahoo will be seeking to create a single profile that helps ground and center the social experience across the network. This is what has been missing at Yahoo — a social center (360 failed to gel and provide that). YOS also seeks to make the whole of Yahoo more social by overlaying relevant contacts and discussions on different pages within Yahoo, including the home page. To that end, there’s an emphasis on what amount of widgets (though that word isn’t used) can be placed throughout Yahoo on various pages. The whole strategy extends into mobile (consistent with the spirit of Yahoo onePlace).

Balogh also sought to court developers with tools that make it easy to develop on top of Yahoo, the platform. Balogh used the phrase “rewiring Yahoo” several times, indicating a range of technical changes on the back end to make APIs consistent and make the development environment more coherent and unified across the network.

In fact, the vision is impressively coherent and, if it can be pulled off, offers a successful differentiation of Yahoo from its competitors. It moves Yahoo in the direction of Facebook (a social platform for third-party developers) but with all the Yahoo traffic and content assets.

In one sense, it’s the consumer-facing version of the big vision that surrounds the AMP initiative on the advertiser side.

The looming question, however, is whether Yahoo will get to see these aspirations fulfilled if Microsoft buys the company, especially in light of ambitious, somewhat parallel initiatives by the latter.