I’ve been thinking of blogging about my employment with Yahoo! for a while, but never got around to it. Reading today, about yet another impending Yahoo! reorg, I decided to write about what I felt like while I was there, what worked, what didn’t, and how Yahoo! can get out of the rut it finds itself in.

I was employed by Yahoo! from Oct. 2005 – Nov. 2006. It was my first job out of school, my first full-time job indeed. I had only done a couple of internships (in Singapore & Santa Fe, NM) before it.

It started out great. I got the offer an hour after I interviewed with Yahoo! (Burbank/Pasadena office), which was a welcome change since I was going back-and-forth with Google at that point. Google had flown me from Tucson, AZ (where I was finishing up grad school) 3 times to their Mountain View headquarters, and after having talked with 22 people (yes twenty-two, I kept a count!) on phone and in-person they still couldn’t make up their mind. But I digress…

I joined Yahoo! in the YPN team, which was going to be the adsense competitor. I was excited for multiple reasons

• Somewhere around that time I had started reading blogs, and was totally hooked onto the online “thing”. I was graduating with my thesis in AI/Multi-agent systems and was excited about applying what I had learned to a new Yahoo! product.
• I was going to live in LA, and get to live a fast-paced life
• I knew ad-serving had lots of computational challenges, from scalability to being able to process large data-sets, relevancy of ads, personalization etc. etc.

My team was great, and I made some very good friends. Then in my first week at Yahoo!, Panama happened! Panama was going to be an overhaul of the Yahoo! advertiser product and almost everyone at Yahoo! Burbank was going to be working on it. Except for my team, since we were publisher focused.

That was a bummer, since that meant our team was not going to get the attention/resources it needed. There were other bummers, like every team at Yahoo! “pushed back”. I didn’t know if it was territorial or not but people just didn’t want to take “risks”. There were lots of meeting, but usually nothing came out of them.

I also realized that the team I had joined was going to be managing the front-end interface which publishers were going to be logging into etc. I wasn’t going to be designing algorithms, writing pieces of ad-server code or facing any scalability challenges at all That all was being done by another team, which seemed to not like us at best, hate our team at worst.

There were other problems with Engineering @ Yahoo!, which I didn’t realize back then, since I didn’t know any better. There were virtually no spec/design meetings, no code reviews (not including paper code reviews once it had already been written!!), we were using CVS (seriously?) to manage our code. There were motivational issues too as I saw it. The VP (Engineering) to which my team reported to barely knew me. Now not that its a big problem, but in my 1 year there, he did not get the entire team in a room and talk to us, our problems, motivate us etc.

Now there were exceptions. A star employee Qi Lu. Even though he was a SVP, within a month of moving to Burbank, he called my entire team for a meeting, wanted to know each of us, was just an all round great manager. Most stars like these have left Yahoo! (Qi Lu is now with Microsoft – announcement). Most of the product managers I worked with were rockstars too, so it wasn’t the foots on the ground that was the problem, it was more the VP and above employees that have failed Yahoo! They had the talent, they had the resources, they just weren’t able to execute.

In short my advise to Yahoo! is:
+ Develop common engineering infrastructure so that every group does not re-invent the wheel in terms of server technologies, persistent storage/caching etc. Ala Google app engine.
+ Keep closing properties that suck, or merging them with pre-existing ones
+ Stop trying to beat Google at search. Come up with innovative advertising related products, that are not simply search. Maybe focus on more on product search, or travel etc.
+ Small teams, trim down and promote the good guys/gals!
+ Focus on the enterprise space also, its huge!
+ Hire senior execs who truly “get it” (case in point, Jeff Weiner who is now COO of LinkedIn) and care about the people who report to them, directly or indirectly.

This isn’t meant to be a rant, or anti-Yahoo! commentary. I think the company always had potential and I’d like it to do well and innovate (case in point YOS). Hoping for the very best, and wishing Carol Bartz Best of Luck!

So I know personalized search is hot and all. But how long do I have to be using the search (logged in as a user) for that engine to start personalizing results ?

Recently (last week or so) I noticed that search for TIVO on Google stopped returning their stock graph etc. at the top. It returned the TIVO website instead as the top link, with an additional “Stock quote for TIVO” below it.

Now I’ve clicked that a few times, forced myself to search for “TIVO stock” instead to get what I want; but still Google hasn’t learnt that when I am searching for TIVO I am really looking for the stock ticker. What they have learnt of course is that “most” people when searching for TIVO (rightfully so) don’t want to know about its stock. How is that personalization? Thats just the law of averages being forced on me.

Please fix this, and the fact that the SERP shouldn’t keep changing on a weekly basis. Thanks!

Well thats what Katie Fehrenbacher is speculating on gigaOM. Google might be hiring 800 employees at 345 Spear St. (1 block from where I stay in SOMA). Should be fun to have some Googlers around. Although this office location might be great, I think Offermatica (the company I work for now!) has a much better location (on Pier 1) See for yourself below (red is us, green would be google!)

I noticed that amazon was putting “soldbyamazon” keyword in many of my searches. Turns out its a feature I had discussed with a friend of mine working at Amazon!

What it helps you do is find products sold by amazon ONLY, hence filtering out the merchants. The merchants do offer a lot of variety, but some great amazon deals get lost in the crowd. Merchants charge exorbitant shipping fee also, whereas amazon ships most of the stuff for free.

So go ahead and search “showonlyamazon mountain bike” on amazon and feel the difference!