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Yahoo! Yields Search Dominance to Google

Posted by Zonk on Tue Jan 24, 2006 01:24 PM
from the bowing-out dept.
Yahoo! Businesses Google The Internet
Unsichtbarer_Mensch wrote to mention a Seattle PI story in which Yahoo! CFO Susan Decker states that they're not aiming to be the No. 1 Search engine. From the article: "Yahoo!'s comments underline the difficulties any Internet company faces in trying to challenge Google's dominance of the Web search industry. Google has at least double the market share of Yahoo! and Microsoft Corp. in Internet search, the largest and most profitable segment of online advertising. 'In some countries, it's already game over in search, with Google the clear victor,' said RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan in New York. 'Google's product development pipeline runs at such a fast rate that it's very difficult for any company, Microsoft or Yahoo! to catch up.'"
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  • Innovation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by truthsearch (249536) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @01:27PM (#14550103) Homepage Journal
    it's already game over in search

    That's a great attitude for promoting competition and innovation! It's good to hear we'll never see any new ideas come out of these companies.

  • the analogy police might arrest me for this, but.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by B3ryllium (571199) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @01:28PM (#14550110) Homepage
    Isn't that like saying "IBM yields OS Dominance to Microsoft" when talking about IBM PC-DOS or OS/2 vs. Windows XP? :)

  • my only fear is... (Score:5, Informative)

    by gg3po (724025) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @01:28PM (#14550117)
    I've loved google in the past, but my only fear is that as they evolve into a defacto monopoly, their "do no evil" bit will be tossed. One dominant provider of any service (monopoly) is never a good thing, no matter how good the source started out. Power corrupts, and all that...
    • I think that was the name of it - showing how google would merge with amazon and make some hilarious new system in which all your info would be right there for the world to see.

    • Re:my only fear is... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Mrs. Grundy (680212) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @01:34PM (#14550166) Homepage
      I doubt it will be as simple as tossing their 'do no evil' mandate, but rather the law of unintended consequences will take hold as they grow. Things they think are harmless or even good can and probably will have effects they cannot control. This is especially difficult as one tries to balance the ethical dilemma of doing 'no evil' to shareholders as well as users simultaneously.
    • Google already is a massive power when it comes to search. They are not quite there yet but on the way to having the market share of Microsoft when it comes to search. With Google branching out into all of the other areas of a web portal and leveraging their popularity to steal people away from others at what point will Google become too dominant? Personally, I would rather see 3 big names (at least). A single party system can dictate too much, a 2 party system has too much fighting between the two. We
    • If their recent refusal to give the gov't information regarding what people searched is any indication, they are already on the way.
      k thx slash sarcasm

      Seriously though. That bold move made them take a huge stock hit. Giving away those records wouldn't have negatively affected their business, so the only conclusion I can really come to (given their history) is that they did that purely for moral reasons. They are smart guys and knew their stock would take a hit, but did it anyway. Does this sound like an evi
      • No, it doesn't sound like an evil company. If anything, Google has held a very good history with their "do no evil" process. My fear is not of Google now. My fear is of Google in 10 years when the benevolent dictatorship realizes its power, and someone unscrupulous takes over. It is a reoccurring theme in history, and is likely to happen eventually. I just hope that their dominance does not encourage others to avoid the market.

  • Just a matter of time (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Vivek Jishtu (905067) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @01:29PM (#14550124) Homepage Journal
    First it was altavista then yahoo and google. Lets see who is next :)
    • First it was altavista then yahoo and google. Lets see who is next :) Askjeeves. No. Not really.

    • Agreed. At this point, it's hard to see how Google can be surpassed, but just think about it: are all of your search results exactly or even close to what you thought you would find? Nope. That's why there are at least a half dozen search engine upstarts that are working on the next generation of search technologies. Google has now attained a position like Yahoo where search is hardly their means of survival, but search is still a killer (and necessary) web application and someone else will come along and c

      • I tend to agree. If Google was be the usurper, why can't it be usurped itself?

        I wonder, though, if it's now possible to achieve the step-function improvement in relevancy that Google achieved. And I think that this time around, the giants won't be sleeping-- They'll buy the upstarts or copy them.

  • Yahoo in neutral (Score:5, Interesting)

    by peterdaly (123554) * <petedaly@@@ix...netcom...com> on Tuesday January 24 2006, @01:32PM (#14550153)
    "We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google," Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."

    "maintain our market share" is what's interesting. She doesn't even say increase. That is not a good sign for Yahoo's search business.

    I can imaging Ask employees giddy with glee seeing that search engine #2 has consciously put their search market share in neutral.

    -Pete
    • I can imaging Ask employees giddy with glee seeing that search engine #2 has consciously put their search market share in neutral.

      I don't think Yahoo makes their bread and butter off of web searches. Its mostly on the finacial pages (note, when you look up a stock quote on google it points to finance.yahoo.com). They mostly likely have realized they can't compete and will have to make their monies elswhere.

      • Growth in and of itself is without value. But growth for the sake of greed/ever-increasing profit almost always becomes (begets?) evil.

        If I were a Yahoo shareholder, I'd be concerned by this statement given, because it effectively is a signal to the #3 search engine that says, "hey, we're ready for you guys to pass us. We're not gonna fight too hard to stay here.. knock yourself out."

      • ... and not in the good way.

        "Seriously, if Yahoo can maintain a profit at the #2 place, then there is no need to grow."

        Until someone else comes along with new ideas and walks all over them. Thats what Google did to Altavista & Lycos, Altavista quit trying because it wasn't making big money and Google took their market away from them.

        I talked (rather exchanged emails) this afternoon with Ricardo Baeza Yates, the man Yahoo hired to head their Spanish research arm and by the sound of it he's after the crea

  • Take a leap! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Arthur B. (806360) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @01:33PM (#14550159)
    Maybe they are not going to catch google at this "raw brute-force search engine game"... good for them! Why would one try to imitate such a primitive way of searching. Come on, this is the prehistory of search engines, there is so so much more to do. They should take a leap into next generation search engines. When I look for a movie, I go to imdb, when I look for a scientific article, I go directly to wikipedia... I wish I'd use only one site but I need to look for more than a movie title, I want to specify it is a movie, and if in my native language "movie" is written just like "baby diapers" I still want to be unambiguous... Google still relies VERY heavily on syntaxic tricks... there are so many "tricks" in Google maps it is sickening, just for the sake of keeping a single search bar. The future is clearly semantic, I think Google is seeing it with Google base but for the moment, this is their only "appearant" use.
    • Maybe they are not going to catch google at this "raw brute-force search engine game"... good for them!

      Some say they are already going in this direction, which is why they acquired del.icio.us. Why have computers characterize pages when humans will do it for you, and for free? Sometimes I search for things in del.icio.us, and the other users' bookmarks turn up some good results. It will be interesting to see if Yahoo can harness this in a big way.

  • Hello, my name is Yahoo. During the dot-com boom, I forgot search was important and let Google take over my core franchise. Then in 2002 I spent $235 million [yahoo.com] buying Inktomi to try and catch up and create the "highest quality search."

    Now, just as Google becomes choked with spamblogs and linkfarms and results bought and paid for by SEOs, I am once again ceding competitiveness in the most important part of Internet media.

    If you are a shareholder, and this bothers you, please remember you bought stock in a company WHOSE NAME MEANS FUCKING IDIOT [m-w.com].

    Thank you, and have a nice day.

  • only a message to investors (Score:5, Insightful)

    by snooo53 (663796) * on Tuesday January 24 2006, @01:35PM (#14550186) Journal
    This doesn't mean Yahoo is going to abandon searching by any means. Instead I think this is a message to investors not to grade them by their search marketshare becuase they don't consider that important anymore. If anything, this opens up the door to more innovation because they can be the quiet underdog. Yahoo can focus more on R&D and let google try to struggle to maintain dominance when investors are breathing down their necks about profit numbers and market share

    Not too long ago, didn't AMD essentially throw in the towel to Intel by saying they weren't going to compete for the fastest processor anymore? And look at what they are offering today with their 64bit processors. As long as yahoo continues to innovate they aren't dead

    • Instead I think this is a message to investors not to grade them by their search marketshare becuase they don't consider that important anymore.

      I couldn't agree more. Yahoo has much more than just search results and the focus should be elsewhere. Google on the other hand is search engine first that generates its revenue by being the largest adsense website. Google's focus is obviously search.
  • But even a quick look will show you that Google is aware of their preeminence in the search engine arena. While they are still innovating, I'm just waiting for them to become so caught up in their own greatness that they kick back and rest on their laurels.

    Because that's when somebody'll come up with "a better mousetrap" and unseat the reigning kings of search. Anybody here remember Browser War I (BW I)? Microsoft won that one and suddenly Insecure Exploder didn't need to be improved any more.

    Sorta like the way Wal-Mart grew up (hellfire, I can remember driving out of the city to a rural area just to shop at Wal-mart. Now that they're a retailing juggernaut I avoid Wal-mart whenever possible - their customer service sucks almost as bad as their mostly-imported product lines).

  • Very interesting coincidence (Score:5, Insightful)

    by truthsearch (249536) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @01:40PM (#14550236) Homepage Journal
    The /. quote on the bottom of this page:

    Lack of capability is usually disguised by lack of interest.
    • 'Google's product development pipeline runs at such a fast rate that it's very difficult for any company, Microsoft or Yahoo! to catch up.'

      To me this looks like a pretty clear confession of having smaller balls. Erhm. A smaller pipeline. NO NO NO, not that, you know what I mean.

  • Quality of Google Search has decreased however... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by us7892 (655683) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @01:41PM (#14550242)
    It used to be that technical searches (the kind you use at work when searching for code snippets, general help, etc.) turned up some excellent result using Google. Back when AltaVista was still around, I switched to google because Google had great result lists.

    In the past year or so, there are just too many junk results. Sites which exist only to flood us with google ads; sites that are fake (you know the ones, with obviously bulk generated text to "match" your search); and poor "help" sites which also seem to exist just for ad revenue...

    The next "google" will be the one that filters out the garbage, and brings the result lists back to the way they were 1999-2001...actually, Google will probably allow us to mark results as bogus, like a personal "black list". Maybe they allow this already?
  • Yahoo must be confused as to whether it should be happy or sad, happy that it had invested in the then startup called Google, or sad that the small baby has overtaken the daddy himself!
  • To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.

  • 'Google's product development pipeline runs at such a fast rate that it's very difficult for any company, Microsoft or Yahoo! to catch up.'

    It's not just coincedence that Google only hires the best and brightest to work for them.

    So is this going to be the future of industry in the U.S.? Whoever gets the brightest and smartest, not only wins, but dominates for generations to come?

    If so, the populace is woefully unprepared. Considering that teachers are largely mediocre, the educational system is under

  • Looking out for #1 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by digitaldc (879047) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @01:47PM (#14550292)
    "It really ought to be their goal" to be No. 1, he said. "Whether it's realistic or not."

    I'm a big dreamer. I shoot for unrealistic goals all the time and it totally works for me.
  • I for one have been using google for over 6 years now - and the search results have always been EXACT. I have never liked the link whore page that is Yahoo, and before that I used "Infoseek" (1996) because it had "Search within results" - after they became "Go" it went downhill and I switched to google. I have never seen an instance where Google hasn't delivered on its promises, for all but 1 period of time. I remember being frustrated in late 2002 early 2003 when the search results were including meanin

  • Makes sense. Yahoo is much more than "search." (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dpbsmith (263124) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @01:52PM (#14550344) Homepage
    I'm reasonably net-savvy, but wife is a computer layperson. She's quite "computer literate" but has no real depth technical understanding. She bought a Gateway about six years ago, choosing Gateway because the liked the Holstein motif. She specifically wanted it to be _her_ computer and wanted me _not_ to "help" her or hang over her shoulder or kibbitz.

    When you double-clicked the IE icon, it brought you to a Gateway-badged version of the Yahoo home page. So, her network experience started with Yahoo and she never turned back.

    By the time I offered to help her configure Outlook Express to work with our ISP's email, something I thought she might have trouble with, she said "But I already have email." She had signed up for a Yahoo account, and she thought and still thinks that there's no reason at all to use anything else. (And she was proved right when our ISP had some infuriating email outages, lasting several days each, and my email was interrupted while Yahoo's was completely unaffected).

    She uses Yahoo weather, Yahoo maps, belongs to several Yahoo groups, books her plane flights with Yahoo travel, and so forth and so on. Yahoo is well-designed, engaging, caters to novices, and is a portal to many things that she wants to do on the Internet.

    It is, in fact, all the things that AOL tried to be and wasn't.

    The only thing she doesn't use Yahoo for is searching. Within about a month after Google launched, I discovered it and was impressed by how much better it was than either Yahoo or Altavista. I mentioned it to her, she tried it, she loved it, and has used nothing else since.

    I have no idea at all what Lycos and all the others are up to these days...

  • I use Yahoo for many things every day - maps, email (yes, I like Yahoo's implementation of both of these better than Google's), weather, yellow pages, movie times, you name it. General searching? Never. They do plenty of other things (many of which could be thought of as very narrow search engines, like for movie times or weather), I can see why they don't want to put all their effort into competing with Google for the general search market. They're not giving up, they're just choosing to focus on other

  • Horsepucky! (Score:5, Informative)

    by pla (258480) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @01:56PM (#14550381) Journal
    Google's product development pipeline runs at such a fast rate that it's very difficult for any company, Microsoft or Yahoo! to catch up

    Yeah, right, whatever. Although it sounds like a good excuse to give to one's own unhappy shareholders, Google's success has nothing to do with rapid "product development". Their core product hasn't changed (other than cute logos and the necessary shift from a 32bit limit a few years back) all that much, from the perspective of the end-user, since inception.

    Not to say that Google doesn't keep coming out with cool new toys. But as much as they beat every clone to the punch with GMail, with their desktop search widget, and the rest of their toys - their core "product" still weighs in at 1.3k, fits on a 640x480 monitor, and has a single significant input field.


    So why has Google kept their market against a player like Microsoft?

    Because I don't need to wade through massive flash-hell to do a search. Because the search results page doesn't take great pains to obscure the content with the advertising. Because they told the DOJ to go pound sand rather than turn over my (and your) search histories. Because they just do what they do well, and found a way to make a tidy profit at that without annoying me. Because they proudly know "what is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?", when most companies would fire the developer who put in such a "useless" feature.


    Because they "do no evil", put simply.
    • You know, I remember back in the day when Yahoo! was the darling of news media and many people in the media wrote about their style: uncluttered, minimal graphics, and clean. Today's Yahoo! looks an awful like MSN. Cluttery--much unlike Google. It's ironic, no?
  • Yahoo Mail's integrated calendaring ability makes it more useful to many people than Google Gmail. I think Gmail needs to add a calendaring function.

  • Yahoo has gotten better (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SilentChris (452960) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @02:10PM (#14550514) Homepage
    I've got to say Yahoo has impressed me lately. Not in search, which still pales compared to Google, but in everything surrounding it.

    1) Less clutter. They still have the occassional (highly annoying) Flash ads, but a year or two ago people screamed at them for literally clogging the pages with ads. Today they've scaled them back quite a bit, and the content vastly outnumbers the ads (which it should).
    2.) Yahoo Mail Beta. If you get a chance to use this thing, do it. It's f'ing amazing. Think Outlook in a website. Works great on Firefox. Easily blows the doors off even Google Maps in terms of sheer "How the hell did they program that?" One can argue whether or not Outlook in a website is a good idea (I love it) but you can't help but be impressed by the programming.
    3.) Yahoo News. Sorry, Google still owns search, but their news site (even out of beta)... lacks. Yahoo cleanly brings a ton of sources together with a lot of great photos. Browsing the "Most Viewed Photos" is fun (even if it results in seeing one-eyes cats).
    4.) Yahoo Widgets. Which they bouugh (Konfabulator). Excellent acquisiton. Konfabulator's always been awesome (I've programmed a number of widgets) and the graphical polish is way better than anything you see on most Windows apps.
    5.) Yahoo Groups. Still the best source for free pr0n. I mean... a great way to get friends and family together. ;)

    I still use Google all the time for search, but Yahoo is commanding more and more of my attention for everything else. If they used Google as the search engine, I'd probably head there full time.

  • How to knock Google off the top of the hill... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by maillemaker (924053) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @02:50PM (#14550855)
    Make the top 10 search results actually relevent again.

    Google is rapidly becoming a disappointment for me. Or rather, I'm quickly learning after doing a Google search to immediately click to page 2 of the results to see the "real" results.

    Page 1 of the results seem to largely be irrelevent to what I'm /really/ searching for - it is far more relevent to people who have paid to have their URL returned when my keyword is typed in.

    I can't tell you how many times I've typed in "chicken" (or whatever) and been presented with a top-10 list of "results" for web sites that have absolutely nothing to do with chicken - they've just paid someone to make sure their web site /appeared/ to be associated with chicken.

    You want to beat Google? Find a way to make a search engine that doesn't pad the results with irrelevent paid advertising.

    Interestingly, I'm finding the "legitimate" paid results - those down the right side of the screen, to often be more relevent to my searches than the top 10 URLs presented in the actual search body.

    Steve

  • Ironic (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PingXao (153057) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @03:42PM (#14551293)
    It's ironic that this story was posted today. Only 3 hours ago I used the Yahoo search engine for the first time ever. Google has been serving me a ton of broken cache links over the last few weeks, and today I finally had enough. Google also needs a way to turn off their supplemental search results. If there are only 2 or 3 hits on something then that's all I need to see. I don't need 3 extra pages of dreck. I got modded as a troll for posting these sentiments in a different story the other day but I am completely serious. I have had Google as my home page for 5 years now and I'm not abandoning it. I'm just saying that if Google wants to maintain their overall superiority and excellence of quality there are a few things they need to attend to.
    • Its been said many times before, but I might as well point out again that http://search.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com] provides the same interface as Google.

      The philosophy of the front page does affect other areas of the site, but the lack of a clean search front page would be resolved by search.yahoo.com if that were your only reason to switch.

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