Searching for a fresher taste
First it bought photo-sharing site Flickr, and now it has snapped up bookmarking phenomenon Delicious. Why is Yahoo investing so heavily in the social networking stars of Web 2.0? Bobbie Johnson reports on the new face of the classic search engine
Context & Ripple Effects
Bobbie Johnson's piece lands five days after the Associated Press first reported that Yahoo had devoured Del.icio.us, and it frames the deal as the second act of a deliberate strategy: Flickr for photos, Delicious for bookmarks. The question the article poses — why would the classic search engine spend so heavily on small social-web teams — is answered by the rest of Yahoo's December 2005 activity, which reads like one coordinated push rather than isolated buys.
In the same fortnight Yahoo relaunched Konfabulator as Yahoo! Widgets, signed a Six Apart partnership making Movable Type its preferred blogging platform for small businesses, licensed the JPEG patent from Forgent Networks to clear pending litigation, opened an East Coast research center under a former DARPA director, and said more research centers abroad would follow. Acquisitions, developer tools, publishing software and basic research all moving together signal a company repositioning around participation rather than just indexing.
First-order effects
- Yahoo now owns the two defining tagging communities of the moment — Flickr's photo annotations and Delicious's bookmarks — putting a large body of human-created metadata inside a search company that can fold it into ranking and discovery.
Second-order effects
- Rival portals and search engines face pressure to answer with their own social-bookmarking or tagging capabilities, either by building equivalents or bidding for the remaining small Web 2.0 teams, which raises exit valuations across the category.
Third-order effects
- If acquired-community metadata measurably improves results, search shifts structurally toward hybrid human-plus-algorithm signals, while the pattern of big portals absorbing founder-led sites sets up a recurring tension between grassroots product culture and corporate integration.
The trend: Search companies are acquiring community-tagging platforms outright, betting that user-generated metadata becomes a core ranking asset alongside crawler algorithms.