Yahoo's CORE Makes News Hyper Personal

Yahoo is offering a way for users to check out the news that's most relevant to them not based on the category of content or type of publication but based on where they live, what their gender is, and how old they are. It's called the Content Optimization and Relevance Engine, or CORE. The powerful algorithms shed insight not only to what other people like you are watching, but also what kind of information advertisers look at when they target you.

Yes, the CORE platform is also used by Yahoo as an advertising tool for those who want to provide relevant sponsored content to Web browsers. Even though people seem to think anything associated with advertising is evil, since Yahoo launched CORE on the homepage, its clickthrough rates have increased 300%, which definitely fits the bill of statistical significance.

A few other interesting points Yahoo mentioned are that CORE processes 1.2 terabytes of user data every hour. That's the equivalent of 644 million printed pages. Every hour. And on a daily basis, CORE manages to provide 2.2 billion pieces of personalized content to viewers. This is the first real big push we've seen from Yahoo to tout its data anlytics chops as a serious contender to Google, which loves crunching data more than anyone else. If it's enough to pull Yahoo back into relevance in the search world remains to be seen.

[via GigaOM]