Ricardo A. Baeza-Yates is a Chilean-Spanish computer scientist and currently CTO of NTENT, a semantic search company in South California. He is also part-time professor of Northeastern University at the Silicon Valley campus where is director for graduate data science programs. Until February 2016, he was VP of Research for Yahoo! Labs, leading teams in United States, Europe and Latin America.
Bing is a web search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service has its origins in Microsoft's previous search engines: MSN Search, Windows Live Search and later Live Search. Bing provides a variety of search services, including web, video, image and map search products. It is developed using ASP.NET.
Yahoo! was started at Stanford University. It was founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, who were Electrical Engineering graduate students when they created a website named "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". The Guide was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In April 1994, Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web was renamed "Yahoo!". The word "YAHOO" is a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle" or "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995.
Pageflakes was an Ajax-based startpage or personal web portal similar to Netvibes, My Yahoo!, Myhomepage, iGoogle, and Microsoft Live that operated from 2005 until January 2012. The site was organized into tabs, each tab containing user-selected modules called Flakes. Each Flake varied in content; information such as RSS/Atom feeds, Calendar, Notes, Web search, weather forecast, del.icio.us bookmarks, Flickr photos, social networking tools like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, email and user-created modules. Pagecasts allowed users to share their pages publicly, allowing them to share a curated page of content that would be of interest to others .Pageflakes had 250,000 Flakes and over 130,000 Pagecasts.
MSN Travel is an airfare prediction website in the computer reservations system industry. Bing Travel premiered to the public as Farecast on May 15, 2007. MSN Travel offered predictions regarding the best time to purchase airline tickets until 2014.
The following is a timeline of events of Yahoo!.
Powerset was an American company based in San Francisco, California, that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet. On July 1, 2008, Powerset was acquired by Microsoft for an estimated $100 million.
Vik Singh is the CEO and co-founder of Infer, a leading predictive sales and marketing platform. Vik was previously an American Entrepreneur In Residence at Sutter Hill Ventures. Previously, Vik helped create and architect Yahoo! Search BOSS, an open web search platform. As of April 2009, the number of queries issued through BOSS surpassed the search traffic on Ask and Facebook combined.
Zhang Hongjiang is a Chinese computer scientist and executive. He served as CEO of Kingsoft, Managing Director of Microsoft Advanced Technology Center (ATC) and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Microsoft China Research and Development Group (CRD).
Qi Lu is a Chinese-American software executive and engineer who is the head of Y Combinator China. He was the chief operating officer of Baidu until he stepped down in May 2018. Lu previously was the Executive Vice President at Microsoft, leading the company's work on the Bing search engine, Skype, and Microsoft Office, and before that was a software engineer and manager for Yahoo!'s search technology division.
Bret Taylor is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He was the co-creator of Google Maps and the Google Maps API. Taylor left Google in June 2007 to join venture capital firm Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence, where he and Jim Norris, another former Google employee, created the social network web site FriendFeed. Taylor was the CEO of FriendFeed until August 2009, when the company was acquired by Facebook for an estimated $50 million. Taylor was the CTO of Facebook until the summer of 2012, when he left to start his own company. On March 15, 2013, it was announced that Mike Schroepfer would fill the role as the new CTO of Facebook.
Microsoft's Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs was started by Ray Ozzie and is run by Lili Cheng. The group focuses on real-time and media rich experiences and is located in Bellevue, WA. It used to have offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Cambridge, UK. A similar, earlier initiative was Microsoft Live Labs, a collaboration between Microsoft Research and MSN which ended in 2010.
Peter Fenton is an American venture capitalist based in Silicon Valley. He is a general partner at Benchmark, a venture capital firm. Fenton has steadily worked his way up the Forbes Midas List of the 100 top technology investors, starting at no. 94 in 2007, then rising to no. 62 in 2008 and no. 50 in 2009. Fenton was ranked no. 4 when Forbes resumed publishing its Midas List in 2011 and was described as the “most productive venture capitalist on our list.” In 2012, Fenton was ranked no. 5 on the Forbes Midas List and was no. 2 in 2015. He has been a perennial member on the Midas List since 2007.
Usama M. Fayyad is an American data scientist and co-founder of KDD conferences and ACM SIGKDD association for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He is a speaker on Business Analytics, Data Mining, Data Science, and Big Data. He recently left his role as the Chief Data Officer at Barclays Bank.
Oren Etzioni is an American entrepreneur, professor of computer science, and CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He joined the University of Washington faculty in 1991, where he became the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. In May 2005, he founded and became the director of the university's Turing Center. The center investigates problems in data mining, natural language processing, the Semantic Web and other web search topics. Etzioni coined the term machine reading and created the first commercial comparison shopping agent.
Blake Irving is the Chief Executive Officer and Board Director of the GoDaddy group of companies, which provide web services. Before coming to GoDaddy in 2013, Blake served Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Yahoo!. Before Yahoo!, Blake spent 15 years at Microsoft creating consumer products, like NetMeeting and MSN Messenger, and expanding Hotmail.
AnswerDash is a B2B software company that facilitates customer service for e-commerce businesses. AnswerDash was founded in Seattle, Washington in 2012 as a spin-off from the Information school of the University of Washington. Its software-as-a-service utilizes machine learning to create databases of context-sensitive support answers for end-users of webpages and mobile applications, thus reducing the need for human customer service. AnswerDash claims to be the first, and as of 2015 the world's leading provider of contextual point-and-click answer technology.
