Yahoo is undergoing some changes lately. For example, the stock price has changed: it’s gone down, well below the $32 a share offered by Microsoft. Right now it’s hovering around $18-19.

Also, employees are leaving. Lots of them. And they aren’t exactly from the mail room.

Yahoo, understanding that it still receives unbelievable amounts of traffic (500 million uniques per month), has been scheming for ways to make search more open and useful. One of the main forces behind their initiative was Amit Kumar, director of product management for Yahoo’s semantic web division, Search Monkey. But Kumar has decided to hit the road, and will join semantic webscraping outfit Dapper.

So what is Yahoo losing? Search Monkey is a great looking product that utilizes RDF and microformats and lets site owners create apps for Yahoo search that deliver customized, more attractive results. For example, if you run a movie review site and somebody searches for “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” instead of the normal search result that Yahoo spits out, the site can use that space to show pictures, links to cast, reviews, or other info, and give an infinitely more rich and useful search experience to the user that also catches their eye and invites clicks.

This is the future of search, and it’s definitely a head scratcher to see Kumar leave.  Some are saying that Kumar has always had a “startup attitude.” Perhaps it’s no big deal and the Search Monkey team remains solid. But it can’t be a good sign for Yahoo or its shareholders that some of its best talent working on some of its brightest initiatives is leaving.

Dapper’s mission is certainly in the same league with what Kumar was already working on: they allow users to extract data from all over the web and create apps and add-ons that utilize this data. Additionally, they allow content owners to determine how their data is used by developers utilizing the Dapper service. One of Dapper’s main uses is in display advertising, where they incorporate content from their own site and from publisher sites that create dynamic ads. For example, Dapper powers ads that show available hotels in cities that the user is reading about.

However, there is plenty of competition out there in the same sphere. In fact, Yahoo has their own similar service, Yahoo Pipes.

So the Yahoo exodus continues. What are they going to do?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 3:57 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.