Serenity Now, Insanity Later

Battelle points to an recent interview with Yahoo's new head of content, Lloyd Braun. The interview is mostly fluff, but it does illustrate nicely the differences between Yahoo and Google. Yahoo clearly retains their focus on being a portal/content provider, which I think will work for them in a big way.

For instance, I do almost all my searching though Google, but Yahoo is still my homepage, because of MyYahoo and all the great content that can be incorporated into it, especially the RSS aggregator they furnish.

But if Yahoo really wants to step up to the content plate, they might take a few hints from the new AOL Search. They still get their results from Google, but as I wrote in a recent issue of SearchEngineNews.com:

AOL has made the most of the huge amount of content they control to provide a richer and more compelling search interface than one could get with Google's bare-bones approach. AOL employs a team of 60 content editors—each working full-time to create "snapshots" of the most popular queries on the Internet.

These snapshots consist of specially selected content chosen from AOL and their partner sites. The goal is to provide the results each user is most likely to be seeking for a given query. For example, doing a search for the music group Modest Mouse, returns photos, mp3s, and videos as well as an artist bio and links to where you can buy concert tickets, CDs, and other band paraphernalia.

Don't quote me on this, but I believe that Lloyd Braun is the former ABC Vice President who turned down Jerry Seinfeld's pitch for "Seinfeld". Jerry shopped it over to NBC, and the rest is history. NBC made billions, and Lloyd Braun recieved the honor of sharing a name with George Costanza's somewhat-insane childhood rival.

Serenity Now!