Man vs. Machine

Here's an interesting article from Sunday's N.Y. Times about Yahoo! and its long-term search strategy.

I was at Yahoo! on Friday talking to Local GM Paul Levine about his just-added keynote at ILM:05. He and I discussed a range of things, among them social search and community.

One thing in the article that is consistent with my observation of the comparative strategies of Google and Yahoo! is that Yahoo! (as I've said before) has made a really big bet on "social search" — using people and community to create a differentiated experience. Think MyWeb, 360, Local, etc.

Google is certainly mindful of the importance of community and user-generated content (e.g., APIs, Blog Search, Orkut, etc.). But the company appears to be focused on developing tools and applications to aggregate that content from third-party sources rather than creating an environment in which its users generate the content themselves.

There's a lot more to say about this, but one point of divergence between the two companies appears to be around this "social" or "community" issue.