Yahoo at WWW2010

NEWS
May 6, 2010

Hundreds of Web experts gathered in Raleigh last week to envision the future of the internet at the 19th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2010). The conference took place in the charming southern city near North Carolina’s famous Research Triangle Park from April 26 to April 30. Abundant sunshine greeted the attendees, which included representatives from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Ask.com, and many others from industry and academia. This year, Yahoo raised the stakes in its participation at the conference, beating out the other participating organizations with 21 papers accepted (out of a total of 105 accepted papers for the entire event), as well as a variety of posters, demos and panels. Yahoo received a best paper award nomination for “A Refreshing Perspective of Search Engine Caching” by B. Barla Cambazoglu (Yahoo), Flavio Junqueira (Yahoo), Vassilis Plachouras (Dept. of Informatics, AUEB), Scott Banachowski (Yahoo), Baoqiu Cui (Yahoo), Swee Lim (Yahoo), and Bill Bridge (Oracle). Yahoo also won best poster for “How Much is Your Personal Recommendation Worth” by Paul Dütting (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), Monika Henzinger (University of Vienna), and Ingmar Weber (Yahoo). One of the themes observed this year was openness – a topic relevant to many areas of Web research. As the Web grows in reach and size, one of the constant challenges of maintaining an open environment is the ability to find information in a friendly and efficient manner. Vint Cerf’s high-energy opening keynote, “Everything is Connected,” covered a broad spectrum of topics related to Internet issues today: privacy, trust, authentication, identity, security, new user interfaces, mobility, sensors, intellectual property, information decay, cloud computing, and governance. Another keynote speaker, danah boyd, discussed the shifting definition of privacy in the public landscape and the complex, intertwined ways that privacy and publicity operate in social networks. The panel, “Search is Dead! Long Live Search,” drew in a standing room only crowd. As the tweets on the panel multiplied at warp speed, panelists discussed the path that search is taking. Barney Pell of Bing believes search, especially “with 10 blue links,” is definitely dead, while Googler Andrew Tomkins disagreed, claiming that there is intense competition to get tail queries correct. Yahoo Research Fellow Andrei Broder believes that the focus will move to what happens after the search is performed – that the competition will shift to serving better tools for capturing how users interact with the results. The Yahoo booth at the conference attracted a lot of attendees, one of which was an enthusiastic Yahoo fan who couldn’t wait to express her opinion on the company. Some of the other highlights included demonstrations of key projects out of the Yahoo Labs group. There were also several puzzles in the form of cryptograms and secret words that enticed attendees to challenge their minds and compete for a chance to win a grand prize. For a full recap of all the events at WWW2010, make sure to check out the Yahoo Labs website and follow Yahoo Labs on Twitter @YahooLabs. You can also see all Tweets related to WWW2010 at #www2010.

More information at:

  • WWW2010 Website