A randomized experiment performed in cooperation between Yahoo! and a major retailer allows us to measure the effects of online advertising on sales. We exploit a match of over one million customers between the databases of Yahoo! and the retailer, assigning them to treatment and control groups for an online advertising campaign for this retailer and then measuring each individual’s weekly sale...

Mail search has traditionally served time-ranked results, even if it has been shown that relevance ranking provides higher retrieval quality on average. Some Web mail services have recently started to provide relevance ranking options such as the relevance toggle in the search results page of Yahoo Mail, or the “top results” section in Inbox by Gmail. Yet, ranking results by relevance is not ac...

When harvesting collective intelligence, a user wishes to maximize the accuracy and value of the acquired information without spending too much time collecting it. We empirically study how people behave when facing these conflicting objectives using data from Yahoo Answers, a community driven question-and-answer site. We take two complementary approaches. We first study how users behave when tr...

Sentiment classification is widely used for product reviews and in online social media such as forums, Twitter, and blogs. However, the problem of classifying the sentiment of user comments on news sites has not been addressed yet. News sites cover a wide range of domains including politics, sports, technology, and entertainment, in contrast to other online social sites such as forums and revie...

Shopping online has become more and more popular. Many people participate in online auctions. Due to the popularity of online auction, this study intends to study the possible factors that affect the transactions in online auction. This study uses the MP3 in the auction of Yahoo! Taiwan as the target and examines several factors that may affect the results. Using logistic regression and decisio...

A randomized experiment performed in cooperation between Yahoo! and a major retailer allows us to measure the effects of online advertising on sales. We exploit a match of over one million customers between the databases of Yahoo! and the retailer, assigning them to treatment and control groups for an online advertising campaign for this retailer and then measuring each individual’s weekly sale...

The paper presents the BJUT’s liveQA system participating the TREC 2016. The Trec LiveQA track continues to use the last year’s instruction, requiring that the system is able to answer the questions which had not been solved in one minutes based on Yahoo! Answers. Our work: (1) The key words are abstracted from the questions, so that more relevant questions will be returned. (2) The system sear...

Over the course of most of 2009 I acted as the technical lead on a software package management conversion project in Yahoo Mail. I was part of a team of six people that ultimately reinstalled the software on most of the core servers and developed a completely new release management process. This paper documents the process we used, the problems we found, and the current state of the system as o...