Yahoo! COO: the future of web lies in personalisation and content

The excitement about the new Yahoo! is starting to fade, and it’s getting to crunch time. The company has major problems and the tech world is looking for new CEO Marissa Mayer and her new team to fix them.

To help repair the greatest internet company of the web 1.0 days, Mayer brought fellow Googler Henrique De Castro on board. Taking to the stage at the DLD conference in Germany, De Castro gave some insights on what the future of the web will look like, hinting at Yahoo!’s role in that future.

“The desktop portal needs to transform itself,” De Castro is quoted by AllThingsD as saying. “The personalisation is not there, the tech is not there, and generalist portals are losing traffic.”

The internet giants of the late 90s can attest to this loss of traffic, including Yahoo! itself. According to ComScore data obtained by AllThingD, the company has seen significant loss in traffic in some of its major products such as search, mail and its homepage in the remainder of 2012.

“The winners,” De Castro believes “are the ones who will aggregate premium quality content at scale, and distribute it in a personalised way.”

According to a TechCrunch report, the COO reckons that Web 1.0 was great revolution but lacked content. Though publishers soon found their way online, the ideas were still bogged down by the old print world.

“That was good, but the web didn’t have enough content. As the web created more content, the container got very, very stressed,” he said.

De Castro argues that the age of search “segregated the container,” and allowed users to create their own unique experiences but that still wasn’t good enough as those experiences still had to be sought out.

He believes the solution to this lies in getting personalisation right.

“Once you do that, and the content is personalised and relevant, then you can do the same for different platforms,” De Castro said. “It’s not so much desktop versus mobile, it’s what is the future of the portal on the web?”

And according the former Googler, “the future of the web is going to be completely different from what it is today.”

Image credit: Hubert Burda Media/DLD