Chan's Personal Blog

If you've noticed the complete lack of blog postings this last two weeks, it's because my life had been completely consumed by the new Yahoo! Search. I was working 12-14 hour days on it, so not a lot of time for anything else. I didn't even have time to cook or to pickup food at the grocery store, so my apartment was completely out of food.

In either case, the fruit of this labour is the new Yahoo! Search which we launched on September 21st to the United States, India, Mexico, The United Kingdom, France, and Spain. To learn more about the new features that we're offering, you can check out the Yahoo! Search tour.


The new Yahoo! Search page is also much faster. There's an excellent article over at the Yahoo! Developer Network entitled, "Not Just a Pretty Face: Performance and the New Yahoo! Search," which highlights a lot of new performance improvements we did.

The final weekend of the project was definitely epic. We had programmers, product managers, editors, and quality assurance folks from all timezones working on this. As soon as I was getting to bed, someone from the UK picked up from where I left off, and continued until the next shift. The global coordination of this project was quite remarkable.

If working through the weekend wasn't enough, on Monday we had release day, and I was in charge of launching this internationally. This launch had a lot of media coverage associated with it, so we only had one shot to launch this right. If during launch we had a problem, we would have to do whatever it took to fix it. There would be no rollbacks.

With that in mind, we prepared for deployment. Late in the afternoon, we got the final sign-offs from quality assurance, and the mission was a go. I called for battle stations and we began deploying the new search experience all around the world. Things went surprisingly smooth. Near the end of our deployment, the operations manager was wondering why there weren't any fires.

My friends laughed at me on Facebook about all the military terminology I was using, but hey, there are parallels when you're leading such a large and complex operation. (You know who you are, and I will remember this.) The lead product manager did highlight what an accomplishment this is considering that this is a multi-billion dollar product.

Some of my friends have already tried it, and the feedback has been generally positive. It does take a little getting used to the three column design, especially if you're used to Google; however, I actually really like it. I find it more readable, and more visually pleasing.

I found it remarkable that someone had posted a comment saying, "It looks exacly like Google's [user interface] with your logo. Way to seperate yourselves." Are you kidding me??

Anyways, congrats to the Yahoo! Search team for pulling off this crazy project in such a short amount of time. I am still currently sleep deprived, and still recovering from this. Time for sleep.