Do you think that's why they are winning in the search game?
Neither of them, to be honest, seems to be better than the other [in search].
But in terms of branding, Yahoo is dead basically. If it wasn't for the deals that Yahoo had for distribution, and the brand that they had maintained in some of the Asian markets like Taiwan and obviously Japan, where they're huge. A little bit less so in China, but still significant.
There is actually a great study from a little while ago where searchers unbranded search results form different pages and then got people to rate them. Then they also showed Microsoft, Yahoo and Google search results in each others' branding, and then asked people to rate the searches.
Eighty per cent, I don't remember what the exact figure was, but upward of 80 per cent of people perceived accuracy in the search results was due to brand. So for example if you put Yahoo results in a Google branded page or Yahoo results in a Google branded page then people would rate the results as very accurate. People don't like to admit they are influenced by that stuff.
What were we talking about before, Yahoo right?
Yeah, Yahoo. You later left the company, why?
I didn't leave because of Microsoft stuff. We had really a three-year commitment, and I had been there for a little bit over three years, so I stayed a bit longer than the original agreement. It was three years there and three years prior to that, staying basically in the same job.
That's the longest I have done anything. That's a significant chunk of my adult life. So I'm taking some time off, doing some travelling.
So no great project in the works, just a sea change?
Yeah, I am thinking of all kinds of different projects, and I am very fortunate that I could raise money now, even if I had a stupid, terrible idea.
It's again the same branding issue. But people do have a good reason to invest in people rather than ideas, because ideas are mutable, they can change. We did that a lot, not just from the game to Flickr, but within Flickr itself. Very few things are common between the current version of Flickr and the original version. In the original version of Flickr there wasn't tags, you couldn't look at an individual picture on a web page.
There was a social network but it worked in a totally different way. There wasn't the concept of friends and family.
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