By Yvonne Chang
Vice-President & Managing Director
Yahoo! South-East Asia

THE amount of information being generated is outpacing the human race's ability to digest it. For example, about 145 gigabytes (GB) of data exist for each person on earth. Commercial companies worldwide generated about 48 billion GB of data last year. WalMart, the world's largest retailer, has more than one billion GB of customer data on its servers. To put this in perspective, a normal human being can, at best, read two GB of text in an entire lifetime.

'Between 1950 and 1990, data generated in the world's computers doubled every five years,' says a report from IDC (International Data Corp). 'In the 1990s, as PCs began to proliferate, data began doubling every three years. In 2000, as mobile phones caught on, data doubled every two years till 2008. In 2009 with video becoming more prevalent, data is set to double every year till 2012.'

Thus, getting the right and relevant content on demand is itself a big problem. Companies such as Yahoo!, which focus on both search and content, are upping the ante on the tech front. News organisations are increasingly turning to new ways of presenting their content, including through enhanced forms of search. A Pew research study in 2008 found that 83 per cent of people looking for news online use a search engine to find it.

It is therefore not surprising that the top two apps that both consumers and businesses favour on the online PC platform are search and content - compared with voice and messaging on the mobile platform.

'Search and content go together because you need search to find the right content,' says a study by AMI Partners, which focuses on SMBs (commercial companies with up to 999 employees). 'Content is king in the online world because search in itself is meaningless unless it is used to find the relevant content.'

At one time people came to Yahoo! for three key products; Mail, Messenger and News. But today, Yahoo! is becoming a central focal point for both consumers and professionals, be they young users on a celebrity hunt or wanting to socialise with family or friends, or sophisticated audiences who recognise Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Sports pages as the most authoritative in their respective fields, or people wanting to simply buy or sell a product or service.

For advertisers, this means they can place their messages on premium online experiences that reach and engage with highly defined target audiences. Moreover, capturing consumers when they are online and ready to make a purchase shortens the decision-making cycle. Not everyone understands the science behind search advertising. Yahoo! simplifies the process and connects search to content so that advertisers can take advantage of the tremendous targeting capabilities built into the platform.