Yahoo! has decided to open up a contest for the top hack of its new Y!Q product. The Y!Q Challenge offers $5000 to the Webmaster with the most innovative use of its new context search technology on his or her website. According to Yahoo! the entries will be judged on:
- Relevance
- Prominence
- Placement
- Usefulness
According to Yahoo! they are running the contest “to encourage publishers to use Y!Q on their sites. By implementing Y!Q, publishers will have a head-start in using one of the many new offerings that Yahoo! has planned for publishers in the near future.”
Its great to see a large company like Yahoo! engaging the public in such a personal way in order to improve their products. By conducting a contest (or focus group) Yahoo! stands to gain a great deal of knowledge of what the public wants and how the public would best make use of their products. Donald Trump, in his Apprentice Television show, would surely approve of such a method of finding out what the public wants and then giving it to them.
Its good also to see Yahoo! engaging the hacker community, to help them use their talents for good for the benefit of everyone. MSN early this year decided to engage the same community to bang on their search product and offer advice in order to help develop a better mouse trap. The only thing missing now is Google following suit and engaging the public in the same manner.
No matter what, though, Yahoo! has taken another great step in engaging the public to participate with their product offerings (A few weeks ago, Yahoo! also started offering a free 5-page website to small businesses in their Local Search program). So, look forward not for the new technological offerings from Yahoo! but also innovative ways in which Yahoo! keeps using to get the word out and engage the public in all it has to offer.
