Yahoo, in the midst of a corporate turnaround effort, is planning to speed up the pace of new product and feature rollouts, pledging an accelerated roadmap that will see rapid iterations to its core services, including search and email.
Blake Irving, who recently joined Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) as chief product officer, spoke of the company's evolving strategy at an event this week Yahoo dubbed "Product Runway." Irving touted Yahoo's global computing infrastructure that supports the massive traffic to the company's content and services, reminding his audience that Yahoo remains one of the premier brands on the Web.
He also noted the strong ties between Yahoo's research labs and product divisions, explaining that Yahoo benefits from healthy collaboration between the two sides of the house, which in many IT firms effectively operate as silos.
At the same time, he acknowledged that Yahoo needs to do more, both to impress its advertisers and retain consumer loyalty with a swifter pace of innovation and more relevant, personalized content.
"With great technology and great technologists and great labs, you know, there's an opportunity for us to do things better, frankly," Irving said.
"You're going to see things from us over the course of the next year -- course of the [next] year and a half, three years, five years -- that are going to feel a little different to you. We're going to be iterating much more frequently than we do today."
Those changes will begin this fall, with Yahoo detailing plans for upgrades to its core search and email platforms.
In search, Yahoo is billing the fall rollout as one of the "most significant updates" to its search service, which has seen its market share erode in recent years. By one analyst firm's measure of U.S. search queries, Microsoft's search engine eclipsed Yahoo for the first time last month
Yahoo plans to stock its search results for popular or trending queries with a variety of content formats presented in a streamlined, easily navigable layout. Searches for popular entertainment topics or individuals will present results organized by images, news stories, videos, tweets and other types of information, presenting users with an array of one-click bars to display the results in the format of their choosing. Yahoo will offer a similar presentation for news items.
Those new features will roll out as Yahoo continues to transition its search-engineering operations over to Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) technology as part of a long-term revenue-sharing agreement between the two companies. Yahoo has sought to defuse speculation about its exit from the search market through the partnership, explaining that it will continue to innovate and improve the user-facing layer of its search engine, even if it no longer has a hand in maintaining the underlying infrastructure.
Yahoo is also planning a redesign of its email service, which currently serves some 281 million global users. Later this fall, Yahoo expects to release a beta version of a new, streamlined inbox, boasting a faster response time and new integrations with social services Facebook and Twitter.
The company is also planning to roll out new advertising formats that enable marketers to customize their creatives with messages more precisely tailored to users. A crucial pillar of the company's efforts on the advertising front will be to glean more information about its users' interests and preferences.
Currently, roughly half of the 600 million monthly visitors to Yahoo are logged in when they visit one of the company's sites, Irving said. Yahoo is now "striving for 100 percent authentication," he said, explaining that the company will begin accepting login credentials from Facebook, Twitter and other open ID schemes.
"The vision is bringing personal meaning to the Web," Irving said. "Using insights and data, we're going to understand what brings personal meaning to individuals on the Web. And that doesn't just mean owned-and-operated sites. It means across the Web."
Kenneth Corbin is an associate editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
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