Social search is a big market, and Yahoo, according to Thomas Hawk, may be floundering it. Other people feel that the company is doing all right in terms of social search, although they admit that its strategy could use some tweaks. This one subject aside, most onlookers can agree that Yahoo has been floundering in a lot of respects.

"Over the course of the past one year Wall Street has punished Yahoo! brutally based on what some would suggest has been a series of missteps that have allowed Google and other competitors to seriously upstage the company," Hawk noted to begin his article.



"The problem is . . . that Yahoo! has not done a very good job integrating their various social network properties into the bigger picture," Hawk continued. "Still today, almost two years after Yahoo! bought Flickr you don't have Flickr photos indexed into Yahoo image search."



Those same lines caught the eye of Fred Wilson, and he didn't agree with them. Instead, Wilson suggested, "The problem is that Yahoo! has a killer social search service inside of its company and has been keeping it under wraps for reasons unbeknownst to me . . . . It's delicious search and had delicious stayed independent, I would have urged them to launch a niche search engine on the backside of delicious."



In terms of what Yahoo should do, Wilson recommended that they follow in the footsteps of their biggest competitor. "Yahoo! should launch a social search engine," he wrote. "It should be nothing more than a search field. It should look like Google did at the begining. And it should use Delicious search results as the starting point."



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Tag: Yahoo, Social Search



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