Sources said the plan is being done as part of a contemplation of how Yahoo can accelerate the end of — or actually end — its longterm search and advertising partnership with Microsoft. Currently, Yahoo only has control over the search experience, but Mayer clearly wants more purview over the business.
http://recode.net/2014/01/31/with-fast-break-and-curveball-mayer-is-aiming-to-bring-back-search-tech-to-yahoo/
Of course I'm rooting for any major player to get into search engine business.
It seems to me that if Yahoo is going to develop personal assistant apps and Intelligent home screen apps it is better that they have control over the search engine. Likewise, if they develop apps for iOS it is better if they incorporate search, maps, local search not associated with Microsoft.
Speaking of Apple, Yahoo becomes much more attractive as a purchase for Apple if Yahoo has its own really good mobile search .
Ha, they abandoned all that technology and patent rights and basically handed it to the competition, and now they are reversing course. Good luck to them. I hope they don't take the decision flippantly and reverse course in a couple of years again.
Gigablast is now open sourced:
https://github.com/gigablast/open-source-search-engine
They could start with that and clean up the algo. ;-)
Gigahoo. Yablast?
Hehe, think they wanna buy back Inktomi og DirectHit?
I never understood why Carol Bartz of Yahoo sold the AltaVista name to MS. I would have sold the tech but kept the rights to that name, just in case.
Bartz was a fool for giving up control of search. The face of search might get buried behind assistants, maps, local, verticals, but like plumbing it is always needed and its not like there are 6 suppliers of search like in the past.
They are probably better starting from scratch rather than trying to cobble together something from legacy code.
This story is making the headlines again. The only thing new, to me, is that ZDnet says that in the Yahoo Bing search deal Yahoo DID keep the rights to its search technology.
http://www.zdnet.com/can-yahoo-really-wriggle-out-of-its-microsoft-search-partnership-7000026417/?#ftag=RSS14dc6a9
I guess that means they would not have to completely reinvent the wheel.