A recent Yahoo article caught my eye: Yahoo to cover news based on search data. The headline intrigued and begged me to read the entire article. It seemed very contradictory. The natural assumption would be that news dictates search data and not the other way around. Hmmm… my wheels were turning.
Journalists have jostled for decades to be the first to report on a story — stories that, in social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook, age faster than you can spell “tweet” (giving new meaning to the term “breaking news”). I couldn’t help but wonder if this is what pushed Yahoo to choose a side in the “Relevance vs Freshness” tussle.
Yahoo’s James Pitaro declared that “creating content in response to audience insight and audience needs is one component of the strategy, but it’s a big component.” It’s funny how this strategy mirrors Velocity’s approach to Information Optimization. Organizations have always advised sales teams to abandon the “show up and throw up” sales methodology. Likewise, I am glad that finally Yahoo understands that the show up and throw up content methodology needed revamping.
My school of thought has always been organizational data becomes information and insight when coupled with relevance and underscored by freshness. Of course there are many factors that determine relevance and dictate exactly what makes data “fresh”. Our white paper on IO Monetization gives a detail look at this, but I digress…
In the corporate world, user needs dictate the importance of freshness. The sales team may need access to real-time data, but research and development may find more value in archived data. Despite the varying needs for freshness, the importance of relevance has never faltered, so it’s quite interesting that relevance is gaining momentum in the way Yahoo presents content to its readership. The key to making this a successful venture would be for Yahoo to find that elusive place of perfect balance between relevance and freshness. Each reader is different, demographics are widespread, and how do you infer what any one search query really means?
Vivisimo has done an excellent job of creating customized algorithms for Analyst and Research firms that determine their place of perfect balance. Perhaps if Yahoo took a peek, they would see that other key dimensions to consider include:
- Freshness, timeliness
- Authority, reference
- Document structure, field weighting
- Usage, popularity
- Access context
- User profiles
- Domain knowledge
Facebook, freshness, Information Optimization, monetization, relevance, social media, Twitter, Yahoo
