People are going to begin demanding more personalized results based on their interests, not the interests of the web as a whole, and I think communities is the way to do it.

Ask Jeeves already does this, with their HITS algorithm. This algorithm breaks the web up into logical communities and ranks pages based on their authoritativeness in the community. In other words, a blog that is read by many readers and linked to by many other blogs is considered an authority.

Where Yahoo! can move ahead of the competition is by rolling this community idea out to its much larger base of users. By allowing Yahoo users to pick and choose what they want to see and read, and publish and share, Yahoo can begin to develop a profile of the user. Soon after that, they can begin customizing search results.

So when I do a search on Yahoo! for "Jeep" Yahoo! will know that I want information on a Jeep YJ as that is what I own, and not information on a Cherokee. It's this type of smart personalization that is missing.

Another great thing about communities is that Yahoo! will be able to profile you without personal information. Again, by watching what you do, and what other sites within the community you visit on a regular basis, they can begin to develop anonymous usage statistics about you. They don''t need to know your age, gender or income, but they can presume to know which groups you likely fall into based on your online habits.

Really, there are so many benefits to this form of social profiling that I''m surprised the others haven't gotten it yet. I know they've started - with MSN spaces (for example) and the yet-to-be-released start.com (Microsoft''s fully customizable "new" start page).

Google has also begun treading down this path with more personalized Google news, the acquisition of Blogger, and the Orkut community, but they still have a long way to go to get the level of data that I think Yahoo! will be aiming for out of the gate with this new product.

of course that's not to say that the other engines won't follow suit. MSN could easily do this as well - in fact they've had many of the platforms in place for some time. But they've never tied them together.

Similarly for Google - services like Picasa, Blogger and Gmail are all there waiting for further integration. And if they can expand and improve access to Orkut they could have the foundations of a really good social network on which to build new algorithms.

Hopefully Yahoo! comes out with the product doing what I expect it to. I guess we will know in a couple weeks.

Rob Sullivan
Head Organic Search Strategist
Enquiro.com

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