My birthday this year fell on my final in my Risk Management class at the UC Berkeley Extension, which, coincidentally, was my very last class in the Project Management certificate program.

My professor was kind enough to foot the bill for a cake and candles, which I purchased at a French bakery in the nearby Ferry Building.

We sang "Happy Birthday" twice, once in English and once in Japanese.

Japanese?!

"Happii baasudee tsu yuu, happii baasudee tsu yuu..." You get the idea.

Those are my team mates Leslie and Tamara in the photo. If you look closely enough at the candles, you might even see how old I am this year. I am not ashamed!

Here is the content of my e-mail to Tom Lantos, my Congressional representative, after reading his blistering comments about Yahoo! in today's news:

Representative Lantos,

While I understand and applaud your life-long commitment to championing human rights, as one of your constituents and Yahoo! employee, I must take offense to your comments directed at Yahoo! during Jerry Yang's testimony this week, to wit:

"While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies," House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, D-San Mateo, said at the end of the three-hour hearing.

and

"...Smith compared Yahoo to companies who helped the Nazis accelerate their campaign to exterminate Jews in Europe."

Both sections are excerpted from the San Francisco Chronicle dated November 7, 2007 (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/11/07/MN2NT7C99.DTL&type=business)

I can assure you that in my job at Yahoo! I certainly do my level best to make the internet an open place for all, and I resent being labelled as a moral pygmy, which in itself is a derogatory epithet. I also strongly believe that Yahoo! is far from being any sort of an organization that can be compared to those that helped exterminate Jews during World War II. That comparison is simply wrong.

Sincerely, and with respect,

Andrew Neuman

10/15/2007
The Chicago Tribune says our latest search engine changes make us the best.

By Steve Johnson, Chicago Tribune

For the most recent chunk of our Internet lives, most of us have been on autopilot.

When it comes time to look something up on the Web, we "Google" it.

We don't do this generically, in the manner that someone may "Xerox" a document on a Ricoh copier.

We literally "Google" it, entering a search term (say, "Facebook widgets") in the box at google.com, hitting "Enter" and letting Google supply us with an impressive absurdity: 7,880,000 results in 0.21 seconds, somewhere between 7,879,980 and 7,879,999 of which we will never even consider.

We are more likely to do this than ever: Google's growing share of all searches executed in the U.S. now stands at about three in five. Google's stock, this week, has risen above $600, after people speculated about overvaluation at $500.

But by failing to examine our search behavior, we are not only laying pavement on the road to monopoly, we are missing out.

Since the ascendancy of the Mountain View, Calif., giant, there has been no better time than now to stop automatically "Googling" and to start searching again.

The Yahoo! and Microsoft search engines, as the distant Nos. 2 and 3 in the search market, are trying much harder to land some of the 80 monthly searches Internet users worldwide average.

They have both recently unveiled significant overhauls that make them easier to work with, nicer to look at and a little bit closer to figuring out what we really meant when we typed "Facebook widgets."

Engine No. 4 or 5 in various rankings, Ask.com, the former Ask Jeeves, has taken to begging for you to give it a chance via TV advertising. "Instant getification" is the clever, but not exactly catchy, term its ad agency cooked up for what the search engine claims to do.

Type "getification" into the Ask search box, though, and the first thing it does is suggest that you might be trying to spell "certification." Yahoo! Search thinks you might mean "gasification," while Live Search, Microsoft's engine, offers "gratification" and even includes results for it.

Although it offers a pleasant interface and many options around the edges of the window, I've been less than impressed by Ask in several tests. The site is supposed to be strong in travel, but a search for "Chicago" sites turned up Ticketmaster's offering of Michael Baisden tickets on the first results page. The radio host is appearing here, true, but of all the city-related Web sites, of all the events taking place here, why this would score prominently on the list is confounding.

The concert wasn't even among the "sponsored results" (better known as "ads"), which Ask doesn't do a very good job at distinguishing from the legitimate search results.

The Yahoo! effort (search.yahoo.com), on the other hand, is so impressive I'm going to make it my default searcher. Best is "Search Assist," an expandable box right below where you type your query that offers a bevy of clickable terms to help you refine it. A good reference librarian will write a specific, targeted search. Yahoo!'s search assist gets you close to librarian status, without the bother of getting an MLS degree.

Improving your searching is important because, while it has become the dominant means of Web navigation, a survey Yahoo! commissioned suggests that only 15 percent of people find what they want on the first search. And, just as a 20-page restaurant menu makes you wonder if the place does anything well, a search result that gives you 8 million answers isn't as good as one that boils that down to 80, or even eight, that are highly relevant.

Search "Chicago" at search.Yahoo.com, and you get, first, Yahoo!'s own Chicago travel guide, from the Yahoo! Travel site, with a skyline photo and a link to a slide show of other photos of major attractions.

Below that are the sites selected from out on the Web, in this order: the City of Chicago; the Convention and Tourism Bureau; Metromix, the Tribune's things to do guide; Chicago Citysearch, another city guide; the band Chicago; the Tribune; the Sun-Times; the Chicago Wikipedia entry; the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago; and the movie "Chicago." Not a clunker in the bunch.

"Yahoo!'s release is almost like mind reading. They're anticipating what you're going to do next," says Charlene Li, an analyst who covers consumer search for Forrester Research.

By Michele Gershberg, Reuters

For the first time Yahoo! users gave its services overall a better rating than what Google received, according to a study released on Tuesday.

Data from the University of Michigan American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) showed Yahoo! had seen its customer satisfaction score rise 3.9 percent from a year ago to 79 out of 100 points, while Google's rating fell about 3.7 percent to 78 points.

While Google remains the dominant Web search engine, Yahoo!'s Internet presence is gaining user approval for its network of Web sites, e-mail, social networks and other features, according to the survey.

The positive perception of Yahoo! stems from a relaunch of the main site and its various offshoots which are now gaining ground, said Larry Freed, chief executive of ForeSee Results, which sponsored the ACSI report.

"People have gotten comfortable with the (Yahoo!) interface," he said. "They've also done a good job in continuing to be dominant in communities and sub-functions of the portal. That's always been Yahoo!'s strength."

While Google's search functions remain strong, when it comes to the Web, customers look for marked improvements from year to year to say they are more satisfied, he said.

"For the average consumer, what you see with Google is what you saw three years ago," Freed told Reuters.

While Google has developed its own e-mail, desktop office and chat applications, among other features, they have not drawn enough attention to them among regular users, he said.

"Google needs to figure out a way to take advantage of those great applications they've developed," Freed said. "Not necessarily through advertising, but better marketing."

Smaller rivals vary in their appeal to Web users

IAC/InterActiveCorp.'s Ask.com search engine rose markedly in customer satisfaction ratings, up 5.6 percent to 75 points as it improved its search technology and embarked on an ambitious advertising campaign rare for the sector.

Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, which has moved its focus from Internet access services to become an ad-supported source of e-mail and entertainment, slipped more than 9 percent to a score of 67 points.

ForeSee said AOL's score was only slightly higher than the customer satisfaction levels earned by some U.S. government agencies also measured by ACSI, most notably the Internal Revenue Service tax authority.

The ACSI method uses data from interviews of nearly 70,000 customers to measure satisfaction with more than 200 companies in 45 industries. The Internet business data was compiled in the second quarter with at least 250 respondents for each company studied.

Reprinted from Yahoo! News.