Comments on: New Search Patents Granted December 5, 2006 – Tracking Yahoo’s Buzz

By: swong

swong — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 18:27:01 +0000

The Yahoo! Buzz Index goes way beyond what you see on the public site. Back when I was at Yahoo! we conceived of the product as a marketing dashboard that would give you all types of insight on arguably one of the largest online panels in the world.

The client version (http://buzz.yahoo.com/client/)of the Buzz Index empowers marketers to slice and dice data to find out aggregate information (without personally identifiable information) about who was engaging with a brand, concept, or search term.

It was a lot of fun dreaming up that product when I was at Yahoo! Glad to finally see the patent has been granted.

By: Bill Slawski

Bill Slawski — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 23:54:06 +0000

On a massively large site, you still want to measure traffic and click throughs to see how people are using your site. The Yahoo patent takes that one step further in trying to learn from user interaction what people find interesting, and any trends in those interests.

I hadn’t tied the Buzzlog to this effort, but I think that you’re right, and I probably should have. :)

By: Blackbeard

Blackbeard — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 21:22:07 +0000

I’m not surprised about the Yahoo Buzz patent. The Yahoo Buzzlog is surprisingly good about keeping up with the latest buzz and changes in search behavior. It makes sense that they would patent such technology.