Yahoo doesn’t have to become iWon / Lycos
9 02 2006Oi… it’s iWon all over again… I like the suggestion from Bubble Generation:
Don’t pay people to use search–pay people to help improve Yahoo search. Give anyone a tiny micropayment for a tiny contribution to Y search. Leverage the massively distributed specialization of the edge to improve/filter/rank results.
Don’t know that micropayments is the right vehicle for motivation, nor necessarily that social tagging is the right answer here on the algorithms side, (though it definitely does have merit), but they’re definitely onto something solid about using the Yahoo userbase much more actively, (as I used to use mine at ATW many years ago, all made even more disappointing since Yahoo Search is an ATW derivative).
The short answer really is that Yahoo doesn’t need to offer any more incentive than actually really working with and then delivering ideas from their customers on how to make their individual search occasions more relevant to them. Think about how much it’s worth, (in prestige, and, for many, actually in cash) to be listed on a “Top 500 Contributors to Yahoo Search” for the Month / Year. Forget about giving them $1 per 100 searches or a bonus 5000 frequent flyer miles, (whoo-hoo!) or, even better yet, taking the whole iWon playbook and providing entries to a weekly drawing for $1M.
Give folks the ability to contribute, (ideas, code snippets, heck, whole add-on search-based products that Yahoo could then endorse and promote to the benefit of both that person and Yahoo) and then the ability to point to a Yahoo URL that says “Joe helped us blah, which resulted in one of the most used Yahoo apps in the last year” and if you don’t think that’ll be a huge catalyst for increasing interest / loyalty / positive press, etc., you’re smoking something! 
And as to how to work through the tremendous number of thoughts / random brainstorms / add-on products, etc., guess what - Yahoo has a couple of social tagging assets it’s picked up recently. Since they’re trying to raise interest / engagement, etc. amongst the masses, the masses seem a good place to start!
