Web Concepts

Archive for the ‘Yahoo’ Category

Over at Mashable the editors were monitoring new traffic across the Web via Akamai’s Net Usage Index, a traffic meter that keeps real time tabs on how many visitors per minute are landing on more than 100 major news sites. In the minutes after Donovan’s game-clinching, elimination-defying goal during added stoppage time, Web traffic spiked to 11.2 million visitors per minute, eclipsing even the 2008 U.S. presidential election as measured by the viewers per minute metric.

Of course, Donovan can’t take all the credit. Elsewhere in South Africa England and Slovenia were wrapping up a similarly tense match, and all that breaking news hitting the wire at once likely contributed to the spike, which reportedly threw Yahoo Sports out of sorts for several minutes and also caused some Twitter issues (what doesn’t these days?).

The all-time news traffic record was set on the first day of World Cup play at 12 million visitors per minute, but apparently Akamai’s final numbers aren’t in yet on today’s action. That means today’s post-game spike could be the biggest ever or it could remain the second biggest traffic uptick in history. But it also means that as the World Cup moves into more and more meaningful games, we may see the record eclipsed again and again. Somebody better tell the IT guys over Yahoo to cancel their weekend plans.

[Mashable, homepage photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty]

Say you have three days to spend in New York City, the most photographed city in the world. The Yahoo software starts by separating tourist photos taken in New York from photos posted by city-dwellers, using geolocation data to ensure a user's string of NYC photos covered a short span of time before moving on elsewhere. It then uses the frequency of different landmarks to determine what attractions the crowd finds most popular.

It then begins looking at the timestamps across that universe of NYC tourist photos. How long did most people spend at each attraction? How long did it take people, on average, to get from the Statue of Liberty downtown to the Metropolitan Museum uptown? From Rockefeller Center over to the nearby MoMA?

By crunching all this visual and geolocation data, the program can turn out a detailed itinerary to help travelers make the most of their limited time at a destination. Moreover, the crowdsourced itineraries scored rather well against professionally prepared itineraries among human travelers that were asked to compare the two, with 70% of human testers finding the computer generated itineraries superior to the travel agents'.

The problem with these crowd-based itineraries is that they favor the absolute middle. They average people's interest, and therefore come up with itineraries that are geared toward very general preferences. The next step is greater personalization -- allowing different travelers to input their personal interests and figure a way to have the program bias that itinerary toward Flickr users with similar interests.

In tests the program was limited to London, Paris, Barcelona, New York, and San Francisco, but with some further work and refinement could be extended to smaller and less popular destinations as well.

[Technology Review]

Company Yahoo has released the beta-version of the Internet-pager Yahoo Messenger 9.0.

In the presented software product a plenty of improvements and innovations is realized. Developers, in particular, allocate the advanced interface, completely updated appearance of the list of contacts and additional skins. In pager Yahoo Messenger 9.0 there was a support of additional languages for the users living in territories of Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India and Vietnam.

The expanded integration with on-line service Flickr will allow users Yahoo Messenger 9.0 to exchange photos and to keep them in the accounts on site Flickr. Besides structure Yahoo Messenger 9.0 includes the new mediaplayer providing an opportunity of reproduction of videoclips and viewing of images directly in a window the Internet-pager. Among other it is necessary to mention the increased area for accommodation of images, associated with names in the book of contacts, and also the expanded opportunities of voice dialogue.

Company Yahoo after competitors has updated a cursor of the search system having expanded its opportunities and having raised accuracy of given out results.

Till May 2004 Yahoo used technologies of competing company Google. However three and a half of a year back Yahoo has passed to application of own cursor constructed on the basis of operating time before got companies Overture and Inktomi. Firm technologies of struggle against a spam have been built in a search cursor thus for a filtration of superfluous references and search dust.

Present updating of cursor Yahoo Search became the most scale from the moment of refusal of development Google. The new version of Yahoo search engine provides more relevant results, and the mechanism of the unified search as informs The Wall Street Journal, allows to receive the information from sources of various types, for example, from collections of images, usual a web-sites and news resources. Besides in results of search data on forthcoming cultural and business events from a database of service Upcoming.org are added.

Company Yahoo also has improved built in mechanism Search Assist. After input of first three letters of inquiry on the screen there is a falling window with several words or the word-combinations containing typed symbols. The user can or choose a suitable variant by means of arrows of management of the cursor or mice, or to continue a set of inquiry.

However, marks Associated Press, innovations Yahoo generally are similar to functions which already offer competing search systems from Google and Microsoft. In opinion of some experts, having updated a cursor, Yahoo has only reduced backlog from contenders, not having presented thus of any innovative decisions.