Ravi’s Blog

I accepted a new role with yahoo! search. The primary focus of this role will be development of infrastructure that eases some pains of collaborative development. Our team will also be available to help out with any special projects.
I believe (and have believed for 2+ years) that there’s a huge opportunity inside yahoo! to improve [...]

I got some feedback about my recent post about vertical search.

Discovery and extraction of vertical entities is extremely hard. I agree. However, this is a hard problem in the general context. If it is a random webpage and we are trying to categorize it and extract an entity from it, then this is [...]

Quite a few people now recognize the power of aggregation. These days i think a lot of folks have associated magical healing powers to aggregation as well and they think that aggregation will solve all commerce distribution problems.
Jeff Jarvis has 2 posts, first on future of classifieds and the 2nd more generally on powers of [...]

I look at kayak.com, sidestep, mobissimo and wonder if really vertical search is just this. All these services are useful, but to me these sites are a lot closer to meta-search rather than a vertical search.
I wrote before that the vertical search apps are built based on the core search apps. Google has taught us [...]

So, apparently silicon valley is buzzing about vertical search. I have heard about quite a few start ups that do vertical search in some capacity or the other. I am listing a few here. Most of them seem to be focused on jobs. Indeed.com , simplyhired.com, Workzoo, NimbleCat, Fatlens are a few of the companies [...]

So Jupiter research came out with an expensive research report about ‘vertical search’. The conclusion is that there will be specialized search engines helping you do specific tasks very well. While I don’t neccessarily disagree that vertical search engines may be the thing of the future. I would love to read the analysis that gets [...]

Quite a few of businesses crawling the web for job postings and building interesting applications. Seems like everyone feels that this space has a lot of room for improvement. Here are couple of crawl/index based job sites i have seen. If you know anymore please post in comments.
Indeed - claims to have 2.6 Million [...]

One of the key principles i have realized over time is about operational Friction. Everyone is competing for the same rewards. What seperates winners from losers is that their product or business is somehow “better”. We have seen countless examples of products with better/more features lose out against seemingly worse competitors. What this means is [...]

It is general consensus that human kind made a lot of progress or “developed” as a society since the early nomadic days. Usually, this refers to quality/type of clothing, facilities, ability to do a task or do it faster, better, simpler. So, having a tool to forge a knife is better than not being able [...]

It has been 8 years at this company and I had the opportunity to witness this incredible company grow and mature. I have learnt a lot in my roles at yahoo!. I wanted to write about some of the key things i observed as a member of product team. Being a on long flight from [...]