Yahoos are local heroes

ARRIVING on the Web for the first time helps you understand how Dorothy felt when she touched down in Oz: we're certainly not in Kansas anymore. Discovering that one of the best known sites on the Web is called Yahoo! - and it's a corporate exclamation point, not an indication of journalistic excitement - clinches the feeling.

The international company network grew out of the hobby of two California college students. In 1994 they decided it would be kind of fun to set up their own "card catalogue" to keep track of their favourite Web sites. Before long, the Stanford engineering students, David Filo and Jerry Yang, found that lots of other Web roamers liked to visit their site to track down information or just browse through whatever was new and odd.

The duo developed some data base software to handle the increasing demand. Eventually the traffic to the Stanford site became so big that Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Web browser giant Netscape, stepped in, inviting Yahoo! to store its pages on his Web servers, and it has been a success story ever since.

Yahoo! is one of the few sites generating a reasonable profit from onsite advertising. And since it was incorporated in 1995, it has pioneered many aspects of Web life that have since become the norm. First, there's the attitude: a healthy dose of irreverence combined with an always friendly and helpful welcome for newcomers to the Web, reflected in plenty of basic information and help material.

Then there's the practical implementation of the site: they basically invented the first widely used search site; helped launch the use of"banner" adverts; offered access to a wide range of "chat rooms" on site; brought instant access to stock information, breaking news stories and local weather; and gave users the facility to personalise their news pages.

The latest development is a Yahooesque extension of the old line "Think globally, act locally". Recognising the increasing number of Web users outside the States, Yahoo! has set up localised sites in Japan and Europe in France, Germany, Britain and Ireland.

Yahoo! is the first of the major search engines and indexes to offer a site that specifically includes Irish content - which might seem natural enough, given that its name comes from the doltish race encountered by Gulliver in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (one story has it that Yahoo! actually stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" but Filo and Yang claim they just considered themselves a couple of yahoos).

Ralph Averbuch, the London based producer of Yahoo! UK and Ireland, has been pleased with the response so far.

"We thought we had a pretty good handle on the numbers when we were about to launch Yahoo! Europe; we knew what the domains were [the part of an email address that indicates where someone is from] for users of Yahoo.com. But from day one, usage has been twice what we expected."

Yahoo! Europe is currently generating over a million page views per day (compared with Yahoo's worldwide total of 30 million daily page views). So what's the difference, then, between Yahoo.com (the main US site), and Yahoo.co.uk (the UK/Ireland site)? To begin with, says Averbuch, there's a different "ontological" set up. That means that Web pages from Britain and Ireland are given a special tag which pushes them to the top of a list when you do a search on the site.

So, if you are interested in finding out about, say, elections the initial sites offered to you will be in Britain and Ireland. If you want, you can also request a worldwide search (a regular, unweighted one). The site is organised under the usual "hierarchical" indexed approach, so if you know you want information on sports, you click on that area then look at its subheadings - say, football - specifically in Britain or Ireland.

Yahoo!'s London team is backed up by Web surfers dispersed across other cities who categorise British and Irish content. "We know we have to put in time and effort to make it comprehensive," Averbuch says.

The site has one weakness at the moment: it portends to offer a "news headlines" section for both the UK and Ireland, but in fact all the headlines are for British news. Even the Dunnes tribunal, which has even made the New York Times, failed to register in Yahoo!'s local news headlines. Averbuch says they are already addressing the problem, and hope to incorporate Irish news shortly.

Such is the nature of the business that they have to second guess where the Web is going next; and in an industry where "Web time" means a blisteringly fast pace of change, that's no simple feat. The trend over the past year has been for Web indexes and search engines to become self styled "Web navigational services" which "aggregate" information for users.

Offering a single stop for stock quotes, headlines and sports results means they stay on the site longer, which makes advertisers happy. But information providers such as Yahoo! know that you can click away in a nanosecond if they don't supply what you want, so they're always trying to spot - or create - trends.

For their UK/Ireland site, that means expanding overall news resources in the coming months.

But in general, Yahoo! is watching online developments such as WebTV. "It's vital for us to look at new media opportunities," says Averbuch. "We are watching for how existing technologies will embrace the functionality of the Web."