We hear so much about Google that even its close competitor Yahoo! can get lost in all the noise. Sure, Google has been coming up with some great things, but Yahoo! has certainly not been sitting idle. What have the search geniuses been working on over there? We're glad you asked.
Google is well-known for its Google Labs. This is where the search engine giant features projects that it is trying out. They are usually in beta, so not quite ready for prime time. Making them accessible to the public affords Google the chance to see how they perform when real users get their hands on them. Many of these projects have user forums connected to them, which lets Google receive even more input about how well (or poorly) these experiments fill user needs.
What people tend to forget is that Yahoo! maintains a similar area on its own website. Well, more than one, to be precise. There is an area called Yahoo! Next (http://next.yahoo.com/). It follows the same pattern as Google Labs. The company describes it as “a showcase of some of Yahoo!’s newest and coolest projects – the cutting edge of what Yahoo!’s doing today and working on for tomorrow!”
Yahoo! Next is explicitly connected to another area of the site called Yahoo! Research (http://research.yahoo.com). While there doesn’t seem to be anything to play around with here, there are tantalizing hints of projects that Yahoo! is working on, apparently not even in beta yet, which could change the way we search. That part of the site also lets you check out the wide range of science publications written at Yahoo! Research Labs. You can click to read the abstract; if you want to browse the publication itself, however, you need to send an emailed request (clicking on the title of the publication in question automatically pops one up for you if you use Outlook; all you have to do is click “send”).
Even for just the abstract of a paper, you need to be able to translate some pretty dense computer science lingo – or possibly jargon from other disciplines; Yahoo! researchers come from a wide variety of backgrounds. But patience can be rewarded. Take one of the more recent papers on the site: “Discovering large dense subgraphs in massive graphs,” published in September of 2005. The authors talk about their new algorithm, which is “based on a recursive application of fingerprinting via shingles, and is extremely efficient, capable of handling graphs with tens of billions of edges on a single machine with modest resources.” The authors apply their algorithm to hosts on the World Wide Web, and discover that a lot of the “dense subgraphs” are link spam. In short, these clever researchers just might have created another potential tool to use in the battle against search spam.
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