News

Yahoo offers researchers treasure trove of user data

Yahoo is sharing news-reading habits of its 20 million users and the data will likely improve recommendation technology down the road.

January 18, 2016

Customer experience gurus are getting a big free gift — a treasure trove of data — courtesy of Yahoo's generosity.

The search and news site is sharing news-reading habits of its 20 million users and industry observers said the insight will be useful in developing and improving recommendation algorithms and prediction tied to user wants and needs.

The 13,000 gigabytes is data from Yahoo sites between February and March of 2015, and will be available to academic researchers.

"This is not just relevant to Yahoo; work on this data set is going to benefit the whole industry," said Suju Rajan, director of research for personalization science at Yahoo Labs, according to Technology Review.

Trying to determine how to meet consumer needs, wants and expectations is a critical aspect for the customer experience segment. The data will give researchers deeper insight on online consumer behavior as well as providing them demographic information.

"If the data are good, then I think there’s a tremendous benefit to having this," said Kristian Hammond, a Northwestern University professor.