Searching for the next big hit

In the lightning-paced internet age, predicting how the world will look five or ten years into the future is a tricky business. The task is even harder if you are an internet company chasing a seemingly invincible competitor, as is the case with Yahoo, which is steadily losing market share to Google in search traffic and search-related advertising. That's not the way Yahoo sees it. The company points out that it is still the US's most popular web portal, with some 500 million visitors per month. It is also the US's top website for email and online news. This has enabled it to amass unprecedented amounts of data about the habits and preferences of its users, information that if used in the right way could transform its business. With this goal in mind, last year the company launched Yahoo Research, with three labs in California and others in New York, Europe and South America. Yahoo Research says it is developing “the new sciences of the internet”: research into online marketing and interactivity that combines artificial intelligence and economics with traditional computer sciences. Heading the effort is senior vice-president of research Usama Fayyad, a pioneer of data mining. Robert Buderi asked him about his plans to get an edge on the competition – and what it all means for the web's future.