★ Interview Yahoo! : Tapan Bhat & Rich Riley
As Yahoo! launched their new homepage in Europe last week, I had the opportunity to ask few questions to Rich Riley, head of Yahoo! Europe and Tapan Bhat, Senior Vice-president of Integrated Consumer Experience. I could have asked them thousands of questions but hey, I was not the only one over there :) (too bad!). So Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, it is said, is gaining search market at the expense of Yahoo!. But the Sunnyvale company is holding strong and clearly shows no fear.
Please note that : I originally published this interview in French on June 26th over at NetEco, one of the magazines I work for as an IT journalist.
You just launched the new Yahoo! homepage in France and in the UK. What is the position of Yahoo! in France ?
Rich Riley : On a monthly basis we have 15,7 million unique visitors. I believe we’re in the fifth or sixth position. France is one of the four countries in which we’ve been testing the new homepage those past few months.
How does the new Yahoo.com really differs from My Yahoo! ?
Tapan Bhat : My Yahoo! targets users who are looking for a more advanced level of customization. You know, there are some people who like to build everything themselves and some other who just like to do the painting here and there.
So that new homepage does not mean the end of My Yahoo! ?
Tapan Bhat : No. We will continue to develop on My Yahoo! as well.
What is Yahoo! doing on the search market today and how come you do not promote Search Monkey ?
Tapan Bhat : We constantly try to understand our users’ needs. To achieve that, one of the tool we do use is Search Monkey which enables web users to highlight certain types of results.
Does Microsoft’s new search engine Bing scare you ?
Rich Riley : Scare us ? We have no reason to be scared ! We’ll continue to do our best to answer our users’ needs. We believe that in four or five years search engines will be very different and not just a list of 10 blue links.
You remember the Garlinhouse letter, right ? One of the cornerstones of the Open Strategy certainly is the new Yahoo! Profile. Could this mean that Yahoo! will close MyBlogLog ?
Tapan Bhat : Not not really. MyBlogLog is linked to a very small community whereas Yahoo! Profile really is a members directory. Also now with Yahoo! Profile you can have your blog we migrated from 360 which is not the case on MyBlogLog.
Today Yahoo! is an Open ID provider. In the future do you think I will be able to log in the network with an external Open ID ?
Tapan Bhat : No we did think about it but I do not think we’ll offer that.
Thank you
