Yahoo! Yields Search Dominance to Google 180
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.'"
Yahoo in neutral (Score:5, Interesting)
"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
Take a leap! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:my only fear is... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:the analogy police might arrest me for this, bu (Score:3, Interesting)
Google was the victor. They still are (for now). (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Quality of Google Search has decreased however... (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Makes sense. Yahoo is much more than "search." (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:Innovation (Score:3, Interesting)
That soulds like something from http://www.despair.com/ [despair.com]
del.icio.us (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Quality of Google Search has decreased however. (Score:2, Interesting)
It lets you filter results in "black list" fasion(among other crazy google customizations)
Re:Horsepucky! (Score:2, Interesting)
I think this view of their "product" is totally naive.
Google makes squat from that blank page. They make lots of money from sticking tiny, unobtrusive, but still lucrative ads on all sorts of websites, including their own.
As long as they keep finding new ways to stick their ads all over the place on pages people want to view, and the ads stay lucrative, www.google.com itself could vanish, and GOOG would keep making money.
How to knock Google off the top of the hill... (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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
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)