Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Who are The Yahoo Two?

Apparently there are only two people on the entire planet that know how the new Yahoo! Panama quality index works.

So says Richard Firminger, regional sales director Yahoo! Search Marketing, who spoke about Yahoo!'s new flagship advertising platform to a group of online travel types this morning at a breakfast seminar in London.

The quality index is arguably the best and most important part of the new Panama platform [although we're not supposed to call it Panama!] - a new process to rank sites and allow for a better bidding system.

But Firminger says that the way the system works is such a closely guarded secret that not even senior people in the company know its detail. Yes, just two people...

One of them works in the search department [thankfully] at Yahoo!'s Sunnyvale headquarters in California, Firminger told the bemused audience at the Latitude/PureGenie-sponsored event.

Firminger was clearly in a secretive mood. When explaining that future search results may be displayed using elements from other Yahoo! products such as Answers, Flickr, Maps, etc, he said: "That's not for you, Mr Travolution." Clearly our reputation proceeds us.

Shame his comments have been reported elsewhere already.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In these situations you will find the code development team will know the factors... as they have coded the solution. It will be setup so that the product manager can configure the weighting of the paramaters or maybe not use some at all....

So the development team will be able to tell you what could be considered - but not what is considered