Yahoo! Yields Search Dominance to Google

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.'"

my only fear is...

[gg3po]

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...

Horsepucky!

[pla]

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.

The 90's want their search engine landscape back

[adnonsense]

Hop along to http://search.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com] and tell me whether those results are also hand picked. And if you have access to web server logs, have a look for the user agent "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp [yahoo.com])".