Yahoo, Build your own search engine

Yahoo seems want everyone to use their brand name just like Google, but have a long way to go. Is this their another step?

With Yahoo! Search Builder you can create a custom Web search engine by selecting a set of trusted sites to search across or you can tune the search algorithm to the topic of your choice. Beyond Web search, Search Builder includes Site search and News search.

Then generate the code you’ll need to add your search engine to your site. You also have control over the look and feel of the search box and search results page. Voila! Instant search engine!

Good and Bad for working at Yahoo

These thoughts from Matt McAlister, a guy working in Yahoo. That means Yahoo's strengths or weaknesses?

Favorite things about Yahoo!:

1. Open minds. In most cases, people are open to “not invented here” technology and products. In all cases, people are very open to new ideas. This culture makes it possible for everyone to feel comfortable speaking up in every meeting or blogging both internally and externally.
2. Smartness. I’ve never been in a meeting where I felt an individual couldn’t contribute intelligently. You witness bursts of phenomenal brainpower both individually and collectively all the time.
3. Never complacent. The constant stream of advances rolling out across almost all Yahoo! products is the public evidence that nobody inside the company is ever asleep at the wheel. They could be driving into a tree, in some cases, but they’re not asleep.
4. Passion. Well, maybe not everyone is passionate about their specific job, but people are very motivated and feel like they are doing or contributing to something that matters.
5. Diversification. Mature companies are able to spread both risk and opportunity across multiple channels. Yahoo! knows this well. That can create distractions, but Yahoo! never takes its eye off the ball, either. The user comes first. Always.
6. Globalness. My experience at IDG gave me a taste for the benefits of globalizing a vision and then sharing knowledge and experience across cultures. I love seeing that same ethos here. People are always thinking about how ideas apply in different countries.
7. Great work environment. The espresso bar; the gym; the great speakers who come talk to us; cubes up and down the hierarchy. Nothing will top the little building my team had across the street from the headquarters of The Industry Standard in San Francisco which was somewhat of a madhouse, but Yahoo! does a very good job of making life at work a nice place to be.

Things Yahoo! needs to change:

1. Control. There are way too many people “owning” things and not enough people contributing their expertise in the places where it’s needed most. The Product Managers’ scripted 1 year roadmaps become the magic wand of power used to reinforce the status quo.
2. Innovation constipation. Few people are willing to take a loss on one product or strategy on the chance that another one might yield a brighter future. The result is a wait-and-see approach. That’s a shame given the incredible potential here.
3. Isolation. The campus keeps us all from interacting with the rest of the world. External face-to-face meetings only happen amongst people whose jobs are dependent on interacting with external companies. It has an impact on the types of products the company creates…often oblivious to what’s happening on the Internet outside of yahoo.com.
4. Product duplication. The company’s decentralized approach breeds an environment where different people are solving the same problem in different ways. This is expensive, but it does have the benefit of forcing people to stay on their toes (see #3 above).
5. Analysis paralysis. There are way too many people involved in very small decisions. You get the benefit of uncovering all the potential pitfalls in any given problem, but people spend way too much time looking for problems and not nearly enough time creating solutions.
6. Where are all the women at? I’m in a presentation with about 150 people right now, yet I see no more than 30 women in the audience. At a company with so much invested in the social aspects of the Internet, it suprises me that the more socially sophisticated sex doesn’t have better representation.

How to gain from Google Adsense

Wanna get very high CTRs? You need to make a really excellent website. It maybe take a year's work to build it up and make it fantastic, full of really good content and with hundreds of backlinks. But Which type of websites will generate more adsense revenue?

To answer this question, here are some guy very helpful website building experience, enjoy it:

Forums - low return, hard work to get started and established.
directories - ok return, but needs programming skills.
blogs - anyone can start one, good return, but you've got to have ideas and opinions and writing skills.
portals - lots of work but should be good return if you can make it popular.
myspace - I don't know.
classified ads - lots of competition, same with dating sites. You should get a very mixed bunch of people coming to your site, so plenty of ad clicks.
tutorials - good for getting traffic as this is good content. Should get a good return if your ad positions are good and relevant. Hopeless for computer tutorials though as techies don't click on ads. Believe me.
article websites - similar to blogs and tutorials. Can you write well?

Yahoo Web Rank

Yahoo has some sort of internal page ranking system - WebRank, but doesn't like Google. Google assigns PageRank based upon an algorithm that includes link popularity.

Yahoo WebRank is basically a rank assigned to a URL by Yahoo on a scale of 0-10. It was introduced a couple of months ago as a Beta feature of the Yahoo! Toolbar, since it was an experimental feature it is no longer available as a part of their toolbar.

Click here to check your Yahoo WebRamk.

Yahoo! Search SDK Updated

Yahoo! Search Web Services SDK with new code and examples has been updated. Test out Ruby and Lua code and other languages:

* C#
* Flash (ActionScript)
* Java
* JavaScript
* Perl
* PHP
* Python
* VB.NET
* Widgets (JavaScript + XML)

It's easy to use and BSD licensed. As a webcoder, I prefer Flash AS, PHP and Widgets(I would like to see it as AJAX). Google already have many powerful developing tools, so wish Yahoo also have more fresh surprises to us. By the way, what's Lua?