Yahoo! is experimenting with building its own “verticals,” or web pages designed for a specific user. The idea is to figure out on the fly, through the terms the person uses, whether he is gay, old, divorced, adventurous, or anything else that could be a group–in the best cases, taking him to one of a half-dozen planned specialty sites.
Parsing profile data to figure out the demographics and orientation of members has two primary benefits. The first, which they will actively promote, is a more personalized user experience for new and existing Yahoo Personals members.
At first glance it seems like Yahoo is trying to throw “hundreds of people” at what Matchmaker did years ago. Members would align themselves with a particular silo during the signup process, segmentizing members into sexual orientation and geographic slices. When Date.com acquired Matchmaker recently, they removed the silos and threw everyone back into one large dating pool.
The second is what I consider the real reason Yahoo is embarking on the initiative. Targeted advertising based on profile content. The benefits of this across all Yahoo properties is enormous. Think of the millions of photo sharing, Yahoo360 and MyYahoo pages out there for the parsing. Tying in personal attributes via Yahoo properties is going to create a much richer dating profile, to say the least.
These so called “verticals” are really part MyYahoo, with a dating twist. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo initially groups people initially. Six groups is not a lot for millions of people. I bet it’s going to pretty vanilla at first as they roll out the functionality. They aren’t doing anything more than a specialized database query, which is what members already to when they say they only want to see young, tall, Asian, rich people within 2 miles of their zip code.
I worked on a similar concept in 1996 where profiles were parsed and communities of interest were built on the fly, which was very cool to work on and way ahead of it’s time but didn’t scale well.
Just thinking about the scale, size and complexity of the project is mind-boggling. Taking disparate Yahoo properties (fiefdoms) into consideration, this is a big project.
When compared to Chemistry.com, it looks like this could be what cements Yahoo at the #1 position for a long time to come.
More info at Forbes.
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