Personalized Search

In industry, news of partnership of Yahoo and eBay boost the share prices of both companies. Many people think it is a win-win situation. I think so too. Both eBay and Yahoo! really need some good news to boost the confidence of investors. Google is eating away the search share of Yahoo. GBuy and Google Base are threats to eBay and Paypal.

From the technology perspective, Yahoo now forwards in the social media direction. For Yahoo, one potentially advantage of partnering with eBay is the huge user base of eBay. Moreover, many eBay users are very serious and loyal. Like MySpace and Facebook, Yahoo can build a big social network based on shoppers and businessmen of eBay. Yahoo can provide the personalized search and recommendation system service to the eBay users.

Web 2.0 is hot. O’Reilly believes that one important feature of Web 2.0 is collective intelligence.  I consider the collective intelligence as the same thing as manpower or mass collaboration.

Does Personalization belong to Web 2.0? In my opinion, it does not in the narrow sense since the personalization technology does not necessarily utilize collective intelligence. However, personalization is strongly related with recommendation systems, collaborative filtering and social network, which belong to Web 2.0. Thus it belongs to Web 2.0 in the broad sense.