spacer image
spacer image

Welcome! You're looking at an archived Snarkmarket entry. We've got a fresh look—and more new ideas every day—on the front page.

June 21, 2005

| Individual Brain Cell Recognizes Halle Berry >>

Supernova: Jeff Weiner

Jeff begins with what he calls “an exercise in sizing knowledge.” Enter the query “real estate,” and you come up with over 100 million results on Yahoo! search, Google, and MSN search. But what if you were seeking a more contained, possibly more valuable font of information? Say, everything Jeff’s mother has learned in the last 26 years of selling real estate in Larchmont, NY.

That is knowledge that could be available on the Internet, Jeff says, but isn’t, because of the technological barriers and the disincentives (or nonincentives) that keep it from getting there. According to Jeff, that’s what Yahoo!’s here to fix.

The Yahoo! search vision, he says, is to “Enable people to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge.”

  • Find: Enable people to find what they are looking for
  • Use: Search not for sake of searching, but to achieve a purpose
  • Share: Sharing knowledge with people you connect with and connecting to people who you share knowledge with
  • Expand: If we’re successful at doing all of the above, Jeff says, this one’s a freebie.

He points out that the first letters of each keyword in this mission statement spell FUSE, and helpfully defines the word.

He talks about finding a restaurant review on Yahoo! Local Search. Because both he and the writer of the review happened to be members of Yahoo! 360 (“happened” is probably a strong term here; he’s Vice President of Yahoo! Search and the other member also worked at Yahoo!), he was able to better evaluate her review.

Relating a moment of extraordinary serendipity at a speech he gave in eastern Asia, Jeff sounds mildly Scientological — This is the manifestation of the vision!

But then, we all have our L. Ron moments. Jeff leaves us with some helpful links:

mthompson-sig.gif
Posted June 21, 2005 at 11:53 | Comments (1) | Permasnark
File under: Technosnark

Comments

I almost broke out in tears when he related the flickr transparent screen story.

Posted by: nobody on June 21, 2005 at 06:32 PM
spacer image
spacer image