The Google-fication of Yahoo! 242
Hugh Pickens writes "Since coming to Yahoo!, CEO Marissa Mayer has added a weekly, Friday afternoon all-hands meeting, just like at Google; she announced that henceforth the food in Yahoo's URLs Cafe will be free, just like at Google; and she has begun prepping major changes to the layout of the work spaces and buildings of Yahoo to make it feel more collaborative and cool, just like, well.. you get the idea. Such focus on improving cultural issues is an interesting initial move by the neophyte CEO, since the care and feeding and, most of all, cosseting of employees has been a critical element to Google's success at creating an always-sunny work environment. But Mayer has been up to much more serious business, said several sources, especially product innovation as the savior for Yahoo: Better email! Better search! Better ad-serving! And a special plea to make Flickr awesome again! In other words, better every product Yahoo has to offer. 'This is the sound of Yahoo becoming a technology company again,' says one source. 'It will be all about platforms and products.' Sources say that will likely mean a big splashy tech or product deal in the days ahead, perhaps via an acquisition to signal the new direction, perhaps with the acquisition of a sexy product like Flipboard. In the meantime, many at Yahoo are bracing for a pack of current and former Googlers — Mayer had a lot of loyal staffers — to come on board, writes Kara Swisher. 'And, by the looks of all the Googley changes at Yahoo, they'll feel right at home when they get there.'"
Goohoo (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally I don't think its the best idea to try and turn Yahoo into Google, it needs to find its own strengths and play to them, and tackle new markets where there aren't many established superplayers just yet, in order to compete on a more even footing.
Sweet (Score:5, Interesting)
she announced that henceforth the food in Yahoo's URLs Cafe will be free, just like at Google;
That goes a long way to creating a happy work place right there.
15 years ago I worked in a place where it took you 10-12 minutes to get past security, walk through the building, across a large area, go up an elevator, get in your car, go through two more security checkpoints, just to get on the main street. Half your lunch break was spent in transit, and you were only allowed 45 minutes.
You were not allowed to eat at your desks, and no break room was provided. Well, it did exist, but it was more like a closet hallway with a two seat mini table. Not set up to allow dozens of people to eat lunch.
There was a 3rd option.... the cafe at the bottom of the building where the owner realized he had a captive audience and made airport food prices seem cheap in comparison.
Yeah... something like this at Yahoo would seem like paradise to me.
The Rise of Flickr (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing that excites me most is the possibility of Flickr getting some real momentum behind it again. Even now I still prefer Flickr over other photo sharing services, and it would be great to see it get first class status among the users of the internet.
I use Yahoo to avoid Google (Score:5, Interesting)
Yahoo mail to avoid google mail
Yahoo (or duckduckgo) to avoid google search
Mozilla or Opera browser to avoid google browser
And so on.
I have not found a workaround for youtube, but I don't like having google gathering all this data about me & creating a profile. I want to use alternatives as much as possible.
Re:Good (Score:3, Interesting)
http://googleblog.blogspot.ie/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html [blogspot.ie]
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Goohoo (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, probably not as useful if implemented today - but the original directory based search was awesome at the time.
Speak for yourself. I'd love a really good directory based search. The web is just much larger. Imagine being able to type in something like, "mail systems api" or "sound file formats" and getting a directory of 6-25 sites all on that topic rather than having to hunt.
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
No, AC, go fuck yourself. There is no controversy over whether MS pilfered Google's results. They admitted it. The manufactured spin in this case that you girls drink like spiked Kool-Aid is that somehow that's "okay" because their toolbar users clicked through an installer allowing them to do it. Nobody reads those and MS took advantage of that fact to steal search results. You apologist drones are a pestilence.
I'm not the AC you are trading fucks with, but this is not precise, in case you or anyone care. The toolbar was one of many signals used to train the search algo (Google does the same with Chrome btw.), learning from user behavior, not watching Google specifically. What the group of 20 Google engineers did when they installed the toolbar and did coordinated synthetic search+click-throughs was effectively that they poisened this signal. A Google-bomb no less. They managed to do this, but surprisingly only in 7-9 of their 100 attempts (per Google blog), because Bing didn't have any other signals for these forced synthetic cases (they were created, not real). What Bing should have done is of course to ignore such a singel signal completely, but to make of this that Bing is copying Google is either disingenious or blissful ignorance.
Google's accusations was called silly by most search industry analysts an experts (Google it :) and even Dan Sullivan who was one of the key drivers of the "copy"-story in the beginning stated later when learning more about what was happening that he regretted his original headline and how this created a misconception (the one still being promoted here).
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed, Google used to be great, but they're like slashdot in that every change makes it worse. If there were no relevant results, Google used to tell you that. Now they serve up pages that don't even have all the words you're searching for, even if you specifically tell it to only return results with that word. Quotes are useless in a Google search any more.
There's a fantastic opportunity for some young talent to invent a better search engine. Ten years ago I could find anything I was looking for, these days Google fails miserably.
That said, Bing is even worse. Every two results return a shopping site on Bing, even if you're looking for technical information. Google only looks good compared to the other worthless search engines. One of you young guys should hop to it!
Re:It's already working (Score:4, Interesting)
Huh??? From what I have heard, Google's pay is by far the best in the 'Valley, both cash only and total (including stock/benefits). That said, you're not going to get rich working for either them or Yahoo. You only make it big here by lucking into an employee-number-[2..20] role.