Yahoo Shakes Things Up

PreacherTom writes "Growing strife inside Yahoo! has erupted into a sweeping management and organizational shakeup. CEO Terry Semel announced yesterday that the company will be reordered into three groups: one to focus on advertisers and publishers, another to focus on Yahoo!'s base of over 500 million users, and a third on technology and development. While Semel denies layoffs are in the future, there will be replacements in the upper echelon for the world's most popular website. The changes, the most extensive at Yahoo in more than five years, cap months of speculation about how it would respond to slowing sales growth, a slumping stock price, and a steady stream of executive departures in the past year."

Re:Would you please...

[SNR monkey]

Sure [wikipedia.org] I hope that helps. I wasn't sure how the reference would go over.

Re:*Cough* Bullh!t *Cough*

[X]

right, 500 million unique users? I'm surprised they didn't claim to still be the world's most popular search engine, surely they would with those figures.

That's a real number. Yahoo actually has some fairly strict auditing process for calculating those numbers. Why doesn't this make them the most popular search engine? The reasons are many:

• Many of Yahoo's visitors are using services other than search (I believe the home page, mail, and my yahoo service all have more visitors, not to mention all the other services like chat, messenger, news, finance, personals, hot jobs, games, etc. which collectively might add up to a good chunk of those visitors.
  
• Search engine popularity tends to be measured by number of searches, rather than unique visitors. If someone uses Yahoo once for every thousand times they use Google, that hardly gives Yahoo an equivalent share to Google.
  
• Unique users is useful in an advertising context (although traffic is still pretty important even in that context), but it is a lousy measure of popularity.
  
• I believe folks who just go to the home page still count as a unique user, and that page was, up until recently, the highest traffic page on the Internet. That's a lot of unique users right there.