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Google Vs. Yahoo: When We Last Met...
I-R-Baboon writes "The New York Times has this article
on the battle between the once #1 Yahoo and the current champion and #1 Google. Yahoo wants it's throne back and is ready to throw the gloves off and mix it up with Google. But can the uncluttering of their page, toning down the ads, and using some features not currently offered on Google give them their title back?" Of course, Yahoo! will have to get in line behind Microsoft as well.
Answer: NO.
At this point they not only need to match, they need to do better. And I don't see Yahoo to be the ones to do that.
will google still be the top result for "search engine?"
google has a clean and fast interface, i dont want to load 10kb of bloat every time i enter a keyword to search for.
When's the last time you heard someone say "Yahoo! it!" as apposed to "Google It!"
-Rob
Yahoo! needs to go beyond what Google offers. This is partly true because Google is #1 and "inertia" among web users matters, but this is only one reason that Yahoo! needs to get its act into high gear. The ther reason is Google Labs. Google is focusing resources on research right now (one of the reasons that an IPO would be inappropriate, since research is a risky use of money). In the long run, Yahoo! will have to compete with Google's research, since otherwise they'll be chasing a moving target. Even if Yahoo! reaches Google's standards, Google will always be ready to roll out a few more features. The question is: Can Yahoo! persuade its shareholders to back that kind of long-term commitment to R&D in today's economy?
Make cheese not war 8:)
isn't it a bit ironic that the first ad that pops-up in that article is for Yahoo!
I don't even need to load a web page to do Google searches. Thanks for the Google search built into Safari, Apple!
According to the article: Yahoo will replace some of its graphic advertising, along the side of searches, with text ads that are very similar to those on Google.
First of all, Google does not have ADS as far as I know.
Why couldn't yahoo start by not having anything as well, instead of replacing them?
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
I thought yahoo already used google's search in their site.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Personally, I'm on a windows system fairly often and I find google is appropriate for about 90% of the web searching I do. But checking results against other engines comes in handy sometimes.
I like to use the Lookerup search tool. It makes life a lot easier than the google toolbar and the tonnes of horrible software Yahoo installs to give you a better, "yahoo experience".
Also, lookerup comes with a bunch of utilities I use a lot - but mostly it just makes web searching faster when I'm working on documents etc, and it allows you to pick between search engines you can specify really quickly. So when yahoo does beat out google (lol, yeah right) I'll just setup lookerup to query yahoo first.
-john
If Yahoo succeeds in its goal, Google will finally have some real competition, for the first time. This will only mean better search engines for us. Good luck to Yahoo. And good luck to Google. :-)
I'm sure that one of the _BIG_ reasons for Google's success is its nearly text only nature. It works beautifully on dialup internet, which is still like 9 out of 10 people using the internet. Until Yahoo strips off everything on their page except their yahoo logo and their search box, they won't be able to "compete" with Google in the eyes of your average dialup user.
-AX
is returning BETTER hits than Google. I don't really care about cluttered interfaces and stuff like that, if it returns a high quality set of links. So far, I have seen nothing to indicate anyone beating Google at that game. Better semi-automatic meta-data handling would be really cool - imagine searching for, say, programming related stuff and being able to indicate this in your search, and have it actually work!
Black holes are where God divided by zero
I've always seen Yahoo and Google as two different tools.
Yahoo to me is more of a catalog, when I know specifically what type of stuff im looking for, I can find a list of sites.
Google, I put in some keywords and it pulls up pages it thinks are relevant.
For *my* (not necessarily everyone's) purposes, Google is more useful, but Yahoo is still good and a great site. Aside from toning down the obnoxious ads, I think it doesnt need to change much.
I don't really understand why there is this need to surpass google. The article says that Yahoo will try to "look more like the clean, simple style of Google". Redundant? I think so. I also read about HotBot in a Scientific American (i think) ad. Using "search4 technology" they want to steal some of googles thunder, when the concept behind it is the very same old meta-search. Some might disagree, but what I think we really need is more comprehensive directories like googles, so that you can search for something more complicated than "Microsoft", and still recieve relevent results.
Yahoo -was- the boss... there chance of getting a second run is gone. Who the hell was sleeping at the wheel when they started losing hits?
Ditto
Just remember, google is now a noun and a verb, not just a number. Of course, I havn't purchased Band-Aid brand adhesive strips in a while, but I do have a five year old vat of Vasaline brand petrolium jelly (got married just under five years ago).
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
...Google have a degree of mind-share now that Yahoo just won't be able to impact (realistically speaking). I realised the game was up when I was watching a rerun of "The West Wing" and one character told another to "do a google [search]". When your company name creeps into the language as a verb, you've basically won the battle for the foreseeable future. And yes, of course, marketing aside, searching with Google remains a far more rewarding experience than using Yahoo; less bloat and of course the superior technology behind it. Google works, its going to be hard to make me change.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
Yahoo! doesn't need to compete with google here, they just need to realize that most Yahoo! visitors do so for the myriad of other useful communities and services that it offers. They may have started out as a search engine, but they've become something much more. No need to try and go back.
At least they'll be cutting back on flashy ads, regardless.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Yahoo has a bunch of interesting features, like free email and games.yahoo.com. But Google has froogle.google.com, which is a pricewatch-like item price search, and answers.google.com, in which you can pay to have your question answered by expert researchers, or if you're an expert at websearching you can make some money for yourself. Not to mention news.google.com, the robotic news delivery agent.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
If you search for an address in Yahoo, it doesn't give a link to a map of that address. Google does.
If you search for a phone number, Yahoo doesn't tell you who it belongs to. Google does.
Personally, I could care less about sports scores popping up on the search page. Google returns relevent pages for sports teams.
Yahoo's results do seem to be improved since last time I used it. They don't give you only results from their directory first anymore.
Before god created google, there was Yahoo!, and that wasn't too bad. Man was able to find interesting pages by drilling down through skillfully maintained categorical organization. Than Man created the computer and said, screw this, I can write a program that can do all this for me, leaving more time for Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters. Man said, I shall call my invention Google. In most portions of the Galaxy, Google has largely supplainted the more pedestrian Encyclopedia Yahoo!. In cases where there is a descrincy between the real world and Google, the fault lies in the real world.
Problem here is, yahoo and google are apples and oranges.
Yahoo is a marketing website which "happens" to have a search engine. They offer news, weather, articles on anything and everything, and banner ads.
Google is on the other side of the fence, it's only a powerful serach engine, "THE" search engine, and that's what people use it for, you'd don't google for the latest news or weather, even for ads, you google for results.
I don't think yahoo can compete in the search domain, so I don't think they should be fighting for the engine side of it, cuz theirs sucks in comparison, really badly. They should work on marketing to the people that could actually care about yahoo's setup.
Googlers won't budge until you give them something faster and better. (or you brainwash them the ms way)
Posting useless rant since 2003.
I mean used them as a search engine? I've used Yahoo for the Yellow Pages and to view some pictures hosted by a Yahoo Group. I can't even remember how long it's been since I used anything but Google as my primary search engine.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
56k users don't want to load adverts etc. while Yahoo says they're going to use text ads mostly, they're still going to have them (if related), google is fast even for narrowband. While Yahoo seems to be still concentrating on how much profit they're making out of their search primarily, and secondarily on their users, google seems to the other way round.
Yahoo owns Inktomi, but, according to the NY Times article, still uses Google's index at present.
I thought I'd go and check out the new yahoo site. So I went and typed in www.google.com - and of course ended up at google.
For a second there I thought yahoo had REALLY become google!
James
the real competition to google is going to be from the overture/alltheweb monster.
hooray! it's a sex wiki
...Moreover, Yahoo is trying to distinguish its search results by including information from its array of other services, many of them not offered by Google...
..For example, someone searching for "Yankee scores" will see the results of the most recent Yankees game in addition to a list of baseball sites...
correct me if i am wrong...but isnt the *lack* of these nifty little *features* that are suppose to distinguish search results what made google so popular in the first place? Why is the concept of simplicity so hard for major sites to understand?
yes that is cute isnt it? but i wasnt looking for a list of baseball sites, i was looking for the yankees scores, yet yahoo cluttered up my search results with *extras*. Screw it, i am going to go search this on google.....
Everyone is trying to compete with google by intergrating new features an innovations into their sites. Google does one thing. It searches. Thats what search engines are for, search on the critera i give you, and give me the results. Its very simple. Google has an 84 linux box cluster and they index about 4 billon sites with it. When i do a search, it looks at that, formats the results so they look nice..and gives them to me. Why does every single company that tries to compete put more into it?
I think we all know whats going to happen to this.
If Google makes an IPO and puts itself on the public stock market, it will turn bad and maybe Yahoo will prevail. Of course Yahoo is public too so who knows.
~CGameProgrammer( );
First Microsoft, then Yahoo - quite a coincidence on the timing methinks, perhaps Micros~1 should just buy them...
I'm lazy, I don't want to change my nice g (google) and gl (google lucky) prefixes in my browser. And gosh, how would that look y (yahoo) yl (yahoo lucky)... Naaah, that wount work, no way.
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
If they can make yahoo lightweight, fast and effecient, as well as accurate, then *maybe*, but even then, if they do all that, they still have to give people a reason to switch over, which would be hard.
As far as ads, as long as they are the unobtrusive text ads, I see no problem with them. Just the other day I was searching for a shell provider, saw a google text ad for what I Was looking for, looked at the site, and purchased their service. If it had been an annoying banner ad, there is no way I would have even thought about buying their service, but because they made an effort to be straightforward, and not try any sneaky tricks(I.E. Those popups that spawn more popups, etc). I good about buying service from them.I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
Googlefight.com
And the winner is.... Yahoo (88,700,000) with Google only having 19,600,000.
d'oh
All search engines/technologies have their own purpose.
/.'ed.
If I am looking for a companies website and it isn't companywebsite.com, I would use yahoo and enter the company name. Once in a while It works for topic searches.
If I am doing a general search, I used to use Excite or Lycos. I have moved to google as my search engine of choice for a few reasons.
1. Google searches embedded formats (PDF, MSWord, Etc.)
2. Google is fast and clean
3. Free
4. Google has cached versions of pages for when a site has been
5. Google's rankings are not based on keywords but rather who links to the site.
6. Picture search
7. News search
8. Usenet search
9. Preferences for setting # of results p/page
Yahoo! has a long way to go despite the extra services they offer (chat, games, auctions).
So who's the current champion? I thought it was google. It surely isn't MSN is it?
According to Alexa.com's traffic ratings, heres the breakdown of the top 5
1. Yahoo.com
2. MSN.com
3. daum.net (Korean)
4. Naver.com
5. Google.com
And dont forget everyone's favorite portal Pajonet.com, whick ranks in at 82,915th place in the world!
Daily dose of news and views and chics at Pajonet.com!
Sometimes when out on the road I like to use a text browser or the browse on my phone. Trying to use yahoo is a horrible expierence. The small screen is busy and hard to see where one thing ends and other starts. Google on the other hand looks like google. Simple and quick
Also wap.google.com provides a way to browse the real web over wap. Also things like the google API just make it a much nicer platform. However it would be nice to have some competition for google just so they make it better
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I've just visited yahoo's site for the first time in a couple of years (no, I'm not kidding) and quite frankly their site does not seem uncluttered to me. There are still hundreds of links and adds on the main page.
If it used to be worse, then I guess they made a step in the right direction, but they're still not even close to Google in terms of a clean, functional site. If I wanted news, I'd go to BBC. For shopping, ebay, amazon, etc. But Yahoo is still bunching everything together on the main page.
But most importantly, I doubt that any other company will be able to beat Google. That engine just works. I've been able to find useable info on anything that I searched for, from drivers for my antique hardware to parts for my motorcycle. Other engines did not have anything on those searches, at least nothing that was helpfull.
Yahoo's great new feature is that you can search for Yankee's Scores and it will give you the scores right on the search page. It doesn't even seem to work for me.
If a portal site had all that and a good search engine in a useable format I'd be there in a second. I probably shouldn't say this too loudly, but I'd even put up with obnoxious pop-everywhere advertisements to a certain degree. (I said "put up with" not "click on", just in case someone wants to use that statement as a business argument.)
http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=the+best+sear ch+engine
Well, the article goes so far as to say that 'Google's pages are filled with ads, but they are just text, which means the pages appear faster and, in the view of some users, look less cluttered.'
'Filled with ads' is, I believe, a bit much... It took a search for '"used car" travel "cruise ship"' to get the ads down to the bottom of the first page of results (and all the way on to the third page, in fact). Most of the time I don't see more than one or two ads for each search.
"And I don't see Yahoo to be the ones to do that."
I agree. To me, the Yahoo people seem completely different from the Google people. Google people respect the needs of others. Google cooperates with the needs of their customers. Google people care for themselves and me at the same time.
My experience is that Yahoo managers are abusers, basically. For me, the feeling of Yahoo is that they think they are more intelligent than me, and that it is entirely acceptable for them to take advantage of some shortcoming or weakness that I might have so that they can make more money.
With Yahoo, I often see advertisements that imply that I'm stupid. One ad I just saw urged me to borrow money to redecorate my home. Another wanted to sell me car insurance, but only if I replied before April 15. With Yahoo, there are lots of "Special Offers". I just saw a link masquerading as a dialog box. When Yahoo shows that it cannot be trusted, then the good services that the company provides become far less valuable to me.
Have you ever used "View Source" on the google homepage? To shave bytes, they have used one-letter variable names and removed almost every nonessential space and newline. Take a look sometime, it's impressive (and confusing).
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
According to the article, Inktomi provides search results that are "every bit as good as those of Google". I tried a comparison, and got a strange result when searching for "bling bling" on HotBot, using the Inktomi index. Try it for yourself, and see if you can explain the #1 result.
Not Found
The requested URL
While google is without a doubt now the best search engine, Yahoo is a great way to check the weather, movie listings, tv listings, etc. I think yahoo should focus on providing the nice lightweight easy to browse content that they do, while google continue to focus on being a search engine and not try to be a portal.
I haven't been to yahoo in AGES, but I just stopped by. The front screen is so cluttered with "news" and "contests" and advertisements that I actually had to look all over the page to find where the search engine part was. Bam! That's all it takes for me to know that yahoo is always going to be a "walking commercial" and not a professional utility.
Another link on their page:
:)
Yahoo (YHOO) said it's kicking off a new search service, billed as faster and easier. [...] Shares of Yahoo fell 29 cents to $24.05 on Friday.
That'll teach them
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
While I'm not a huge fan of Yahoo!, I can only hope the ultimate answer is yes. I hope it is possible for a web-based company to own the web and not a software based company (M$!)....I would rather a grass-roots anti-google, anti-yahoo movement to arise from the settling dust that once was the wild wild internet, I don't see this happening.
/. community would boycott google after M$ co-opts it, that would be a big chunk. Not to mention a direct action perl script campaign against the search engine, we might even be able to shut the mofo down.
Bill Gates already controls too much, if at the very least the
These are the thoughts that bounce around my fat, but small, yet large head.
"I feel it is my duty to look at the porn that kids download before I delete it, to be sure what it is."--School Admin
Personally I would rather be in line behind Microsoft - that way I know I'm not going to be a direct target for a shafting.
Willow: Have you googled her yet?
Xander: Willow! She's only 17!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
For those who don't like the NY Times on principle (even though the link above is registration free), Yahoo/AP has an abbreviated version of the same story.
Personally I think Yahoo is making a good move. Removing clutter and focusing on what their users want can only be a good thing.
Actuallly funny considering that if you google for an address, google gives you a link to Yahoo Maps where you can view the map.
One simple reason why Google have taken the lead is the focus shown by Yahoo on making their ideas pay back a profit.
This policy has resulted in a switch of public opinion. People no longer want pages crammed with content covering every possible spectrum. The new generation of surfer can cope with the idea of a search engine, a news portal and a web-email provider on seperate sites, allowing them to choose the best of each.
It's a bit like asking a hi-fi enthusiast whether he prefers an integrated system or a seperate cd-player, amplifier and speakers.
The average surfer has grown up, and Yahoo has been left behind.
Just my thoughts...
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
Granted, a lot of computer-(mostly-)illiterate adults ("the masses", as we call them) have started using Google as their search engine of choice, as opposed to Yahoo! or MSN or Excite, but i've learnt recently that teen-agers and smaller children haven't begun to follow this trend so much on their own. I'm in eleventh grade, and only the two or three computer-literate students at my school actually use Google. Everyone else uses Yahoo!. Similarly, my brothers and sisters, all of whom are below the eighth-grade level, use Yahoo! (and "Yahooligans" or whatever) for their searches for school projects and games and what-not (one of my youngest sister's favourite pastimes is to search Yahoo! for something like "fun games", and then proceed to download every ad-ware/spy-ware Java-based puzzle game she can find). I'm willing to bet (by observation of some of my brothers' and sisters' friends, and how they use the computer(s) when they come over) that this isn't just isolated to the students at my school and my siblings, but rather is a wide-spread phenomenon, at least in this area.
I'm not exactly sure what i'm getting at, but i guess if Google wants to fight Yahoo! in this battle that Yahoo! is evidently intent on winning, Google may want to hook some of the younger audience, who haven't quite figured out how advanced Google can be. They're attracted to Yahoo! (i'm guessing) because of three things:
(01) Yahoo! Instant Messenger is a semi-common instant messenger (not as much so as ICQ/AIM/MSN, but i know a couple persons that use it), and i'm willing to bet a good portion of Yahoo!'s search engine users uses it mainly because of its association to Y!IM.
(02) Yahoo! Mail is probably the second-most-common free e-mail service among "the masses". While i personally hate it (i'm a Hotmail person myself), i know many persons (including teachers) that use Yahoo! Mail instead of Hotmail. I don't know why, but they do, and i'm willing to bet that a good portion of the search engine users comes from that as well.
(03) Finally, Yahoo! does a lot of stuff to appeal to the younger audience. They have "categories" or whatever, evidently to make finding things easier (i've always found it stupid myself), and they use lots of pictures and colours that (i'm assuming) kids like. And that Yahooligans thing. Google is just kind of plain-text, and for us, that's great, but for some people, that's a symbol of unprofessionalism.
In any case, just some thoughts. I'm not saying that i want a Google Mail or a Google Instant Messenger or anything like that (i certainly don't), but maybe that's something for Google to think about.
On a related subject, i always used Infoseek before i perfected my Google skills. But then they were bought out by Go. Does anyone remember Infoseek? :(
Note that the only "special content" offered on a search for yankee scores is a solitary "sponsor link." Maybe the article should have used an example that actually works (like final four for instance).
By default google is in the galeon toolbar,and I have shortcut, but everything is configurable, and I can chose whichever search engine that I wish to use. http://galeon.sourceforge.net/bookmarks/
Has anyone ever bought anything by Yahoo auctions? I have. And while I know how to shop wisely there now, that doesn't mean there have been lessons learned. Look at the Apple/Macintosh section right now. More than 1/2 of the auctions there are fake/scams/illegal. Fake - just plainly don't have a 17" PowerBook (a lot of auctions have been selling them since January!) Apple OS Updates (illegal to redistribute) Presale auctions = ponsy schemes & finally there's just junk sellers - most of what I receive is in poor condition or not as described. I have even won an auction on Yahoo that used my own picture I had for the same thing on eBay. Just happened I needed it for the internal part and it was cheap enough. Yahoo allows this fraud in order to collect auction fees.
It's the same way in the personals section. There are obvious "fake personals" there to harvest the "innocent" email addresses to spam them with pRon and HGH and ViaVoice for that matter. Some personals have models pictures or are an 11 on a scale from 1-10 and say they have sex on the first date. C'mon! -- Not that, it's the kind of girl I'm looking for anyway ;)
I think Yahoo will figure out a way similar to these, like allowing pRon sites or spammers to have some sort of way of paying or meta tagging themselves to the top.
I really honor Google Integrity for weeding the majority of that crap out.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
The reason I quit using Yahoo is simple:
The pay for placement search skewed the results and obscured actual content with marketing content. All the other engines that did this also lost out...
Even if Yahoo fixes this, they still will never regain the credibility they lost. I'm sure they made a lot of money so they really don't care.
$G
-- $G
If you look in their Opposing Views of Scientology section, you will find no mention of Operation Clambake, the most important web site devoted to revealing the truth about the cult.
Why?
The funny thing is, Yahoo got to where they are now by being conceptually what Google is now. They were originally a clean, simple, text-based index without many frills. This is why they dominated the Age of Portal Sites -- everyone else was overloaded with frilly junk. But then two things started to go wrong. First, the Internet got so big that the human-maintained index became impossible to keep up to date with anything short of an army of volunteers (a la dmoz). And second, some idiot marketter got tired of being a site that's primary focus was sending people elsewhere, and decided that maybe the frilly junk was the way to keep everyone "stuck" at Yahoo itself. The index -- the sole reason people ever cared about Yahoo at all -- drifted to the bottom corner of the page, and graphics and ads and contests and gossip and whatnot took over the page.
But there were already a lot of sites out there doing that stuff, so that made Yahoo not very interesting, and then, when Google came along and did the minimalist web search thing so much better than Yahoo ever had, there was no reason left for Yahoo at all except for the last remaining inertia.
Google and Yahoo are not the same beasts. Yahoo is trying to be a portal. Google is not. Google is trying to be a crawling search engine, Yahoo is not.
Time and time again that "Portal" concept has shown to be full of problems; people switch between them, ad revenue dries up, content costs too much, management makes poor decisions, etc.
I NEVER go to Yahoo to find something, because the first, and most natural act for me to search is Google. Usually, I find what I want, or switch over to Google Groups to see if people have talked about what I want to find. I do sometimes use Yahoo for portal-like services such as email, maps, directions and yellow pages.
So in my opinion, Yahoo should try to knock off sites such as MSN or AOL.com, which have a closer competition than what Google does. Yahoo could pretty easily use their existing strengths to leverage position among their peers, rebuilding their business model to go after the Google-like market would be a dumb idea.
Also, I will NEVER use a search that I know to put paid listings in the results. Sites get listed in Yahoo because they paid to be there, if they paid to be there, they are selling something and won't give me the truth. Searches of the Internet are for information, not shopping. (Though there are segments of population and the internet where shopping is a big part of it.)
Yahoo could quickly increase their directory listings by simply using DMOZ instead if their own directory-creation staff. It's FREE (as in beer) for the taking! DMOZ is both larger and more relevant than Yahoo by a longshot. The part where DMOZ falls down is they do not have enough money for bandwidth to support the traffic they get, so getting useful stuff out is sometimes tricky. (Of course, there is always Google Directory, a mirror of DMOZ.)
Yahoo should not bother competing with Google, rather do what they do well. If they had spent time not sucking, rather than riding the money train, maybe they would not be where they are today.
Without even considering end-user benefits, the extreme space-saving efforts still make sense. Sure, google might serve 9k of data to each user. But if they were serving 10k instead, and they got 200 million hits a day, that's 200GB of bandwidth saved daily. And, whoever you get your connection from, that's a few bucks . . .
...when you open up Google, you don't wait even a single second for the page to load, and it fits on the screen without scrollbars (at any decent resolution). When you do a search on Google, the search is quick and the results are good.
...when you open up Yahoo!, god only knows what you'll be bombarded with. Also, the searches are pre-destined to try to filter you into the various other sections of Yahoo!, such as Yahoo!Health, Yahoo!Maps, or even Yahooligans! The page is slower, less organized, more spam-a-licious, and just generally less useful than Google.
:-)
The only way to beat Google is to be simpler, faster, and/or more useful than Google, and that is a very tough goal to meet. People don't google because they want to sign up for GoogleMail and play GoogleGames... People Google because they want results, and Google give them exactly that.
And the Google title logo having a life of its own as it transforms to the various holidays or other events is almost as exciting as the newest stories on Slashdot
Why does a search for "linux" return a link to:u x/SS= 82593/OCS=82532/H=0/T=1049724247/F=e248244e7fc465e 82c9bf12c25f246e6/*http://www.linux.org/
http://srd.yahoo.com/S=2766679:WS1/R=1/K=lin
Instead of
http://www.linux.org
And It wasn't even the frelling first result It was behind the directory and sponsored links.
So Let me get this straight Yahoo, I have to dodge your directories *and* sponsored links, I get my privacy invaded. Sounds good where do I sign up?
Incidentally, how did Google "turn search around?" In Soviet Russia, perhaps, web sites search for you?
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
Why bother with Yahoo when you can have the content that yahoo has with google searching and NO ADS. That's right... none of that crappy flash blinky popunder garbage... myway.com
My start-page is http://my.yahoo.com. Still, I can't remember the last time I used yahoo for searching anything. I think Yahoo is great when it comes to reading news, looking at stock, getting travel advice or looking at book reviews. However, at searching the web, I like google.
Maybe yahoo should try to compete with google. Instead, they should focus on what they are good at, being a portal! Yahoo IM is also great, and that is also another component they could try earning money on (create a corporate version of it etc.).
To be honest, I wouldn't mind Yahoo getting a little bigger though. Even though google is pretty good, some competition never hurts!
I read them and click on them. Not to support Google, but because they are always relevant to my search and many times I find them useful.
With Yahoo, on the other hand, the ads are not relevant, plus my eyes are trained to ignore most pictures and moving graphics on webpages. For example, I cannot tell you what ads I saw on Slashdot today because, simply enough, I didn't look at them.
Wow, talk about nice ad placement. I click on the link to the article, and up pops a "New Yahoo Search" ad!
Plus, search through thousands of news stories over the past months/years/etc.
Yahoo's news search: Search through thousands of news stories... but no listing of new stuff.
Yahoo's news page: Slow and cluttered news page, one source (primarily) for stories, only one story per section, and less obvious search area.
That's why news.google.com is now my home page (plus I've got the toolbar for searches)
-T
Now that you mention it, I think I remember... Wasn't Yahoo one of those search engine that was around back when Alta Vista and Lycos were popular?
The New York Times has this article on the battle between the once #1 Yahoo and the current champion and #1 Google.
So... Who's the current champion? Here, read it again:
The New York Times has this article on the battle between
So, indeed Yahoo has to do better than Google, since clearly google isn't there either. Just who is "The current champion"? Is this metacrawler, who, since they search the other search engines, could claim a bulk of hits from the other engines' hard work? Or is it maybe mnogosearch, the GPL'd SQL-driven search engine which has become quite popular on small sites? Just who is "the current champion"?
if only google would allow us to ignore blogs. Man, does searching suck now. Half of some of my searches produce blogs. in other words, they produce hot-air from people who consider linking to other blogs "proof."
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
If they really want to compete, they should use an 168 box Linux cluster then, huh?
If the searches were faster and updated quicker, I suppose that might compete with google. But we're pretty much at the point where it's fast enough. I'm with you ... all the other "features" these people are dreaming up are just bloat. Google's extra features are nice: cache, indexing of non-HTML content, converting PDF to HTML, etc.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
The whole view of the Internet for the average person is through search engines, yahoo or google. This makes things dangerous.
Perhaps the US defence department gets involved and links searches to WAR and IRAQ to cnn sites but none of Al Jazeera. They could even build a catalog of IP address that have searched for things a govt wouldnt want its people to know.
This is why there must be diversity and competition between search engines. Search engines should also be local to countries to reduce bandwidth, and decrease centralized control as much as possible. If this, and DNS can be localized in countries, power can be removed where it doesnt belong. Unfortunately, even I couldnt switch away from google, even for this principle, because theres no equivalent technology with the same clarity elsewhere.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
http://au.altavista.com/web/results?q=search+engin e&avkw=rftc
This is the Australian version of Altavista but it still gives Google the Number 1 result as well for Search Engine.
Interestingly Altavista's home page is pretty clean compared to Yahoo, looks like they took the initiative to copy Google a little earlier than Yahoo, but weren't so desperate as to tell the New York Times about it.
Read Errant Story.
After so many years of 'web programming' advancement, the big guys are coming around full circle and striving to simplify the appearance of their web sites.
"Whoa! Look what I discovered. We can do this without an image map"...
By two things, totally cluttered search pages stuffed with ads. And paid ranks. Google didn't do that and people went over to google because it had a lean and easy interface and you could trust the results more than you could on other search engines.
I think Yahoo sucked when was #1, and that it will continue to suck. The only reason that it was number one was people bought into the hype.
From my perspective Yahoo was allways second rate. Early on Webcrawler kicked much ass, then AOL bought it. After Webcrawler there was Altavista, (I could actually find stuff on Altavista). Now there is Google.
Someone will invent something to beat Google. I doubt gonna be Yahoo or Microsoft. Both of these companies have too much invested in their current business model to throw it out and risk it on something innovative and therefore untested.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
...something Yahoo fails to accomplish.
See Contiki.
Then Man created...
Not Than.
Has anyone else encountered problems when clicking a yahoo! link? You get page not found errors, but if you delete everything to the left of and including the * or ? on the URL, the link then works? That was the reason I switched to news.google.com a long time ago (and I'm not going back).
Can someone tell me why it is that if you do a search on search.yahoo.com and one on www.google.com that both create the exact same search results? And I'm not just talking which pages come up, but even the word choice of the description, at least for the first 50 or so results. I thought they weren't powered by google anymore...
I believe this is Yahoo!'s new search page.
If you don't stop reading this right now you owe me $1,000. Send check or money order too...
Yahoo has some stuff that the older audience likes as well.
Solitare
Diamond Mine
Bingo
Brain Melt
Google will finally have some real competition, for the first time. This will only mean better search engines for us.
Okay, here's my competing idea for better search engine results.
Create a new search results rating system. Use a new, novel concept unprecedented in the history of the Internet. Certian privileged users register an identity. Those identified users vote on the "goodness" of search result hits using a system of moderation, meta-moderation, karma, and........oh wait.
I'll shut up now. Woosh! (That's the sound of me rushing off to the patent office.)
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Can somebody tell me where I find this Yahoo page?
Google isn't all that accurate.
:
Checkout this search
http://images.google.com/images?q=beavis+butthead
Clinton comes in second position !
Then again, one may argue that he looks a little like Beavis...
I'll change my sig when I have the time...
It's is a contraction of it is. The third-person possessive pronoun that the submitter meant to use is spelled its.
This is not rocket science. You wouldn't say "him's" or "her's," would you? Well, maybe you would.
google (19 600 000 results)
yahoo (88 700 000 results)
Google is a search engine. Yahoo is more of a portal to the internet.
Google has small text ads. Yahoo has banners and popups.
Google also has some pretty tech stuff in beta right now.
Of course, I like my TiVo to send back anonymous data about my viewing habits so my television is catered to, as well.
what immediatly comes to mind is Jonathan Swift's descriptions of Yahoos in Gulliver's Travels, namely:
... and that feeling is not pleasant and certainly does not endear me to their site.
"A yahoo is a vile and savage creature, filthy and with unpleasant habits..." (from Wikipedia)
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
The point is that as long as searching at a search eninge returns the right result in the first 5-10 items, most of the time, with no spam showing up in the top 5, you stick with that engine until EVERYONE tells you there is a better search engine.
As long as it is working, you don't switch. I think both Microsoft and Yahoo! have a tough road to hoe. As long as goole returns relevant results without a lot of spam showing up and the page loads quickly. They will rule and people will not switch.
Only Google will be able to kill Google.
vi +
they still think they're only the FIFTH best search engine.
amusingly, even yahoo thinks Google is the best in the world
You really think Google can run on a cluster that small? Try more like an 8400 Linux box cluster!
The part of the article where Yahoo is using their other services is the important one.
You do a search for the New York Yankees, and the current game score shows up in the list of results.
This is what Google was talking about in an interview a while ago, making the search engine more useful in breaking news. Its this desire that drives news.google.com (which I also like).
So you're right, that's the only thing that will help, but it seems to be what Yahoo is trying.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
Don't forget that listing in Yahoo's directory costs money now for ANY link. Google's listing in a directory is free.
Yahoo will have to drop their pay-to-place completely to catch Google. Their spiders both crawl, but Yahoo doesn't bother placing these pages in its structured hierarchy.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
Sign up at google.com if you want to bitch and moan about "having your privacy invaded."
For more information, click here.
One word: "stemming"
:
Google's 1st Place position is well-deserved but not unassailable. If you want to one-up Google you won't do it by adding new features or slimming your GUI's. You need a more powerful query language. The future championship will not go to the s-engine with the biggest index but the one with the sharpest scalpel.
Google's PageRank pocket knife is great (unsurpassed, even). But I still get several hundred hits on any given search. That's too many. Yet I have a hard time whittling that down (given Google's 10-word limit) because my queries end up looking like this:
"(search | searching | searched) (engine | engines) (image | imagery | images) (graphic | graphics | graphical)"
when what I REALLY want to say is
"search* engine* (image* OR graphic*)"
An engine that could add stemming (or, better yet, regular expressions) to Google's PageRank precision could certainly take the throne.
--
When they finally put web interfaces in my brain, will the popup adds cause migraines?
yahoo was and always has been a POS. before google was around people who wanted to search the web used something altavista, infoseek, webcrawler (back in the day!!!) etc.
mnx
Joel Spolsky once said:
"A lot of software developers are seduced by the old '80/20' rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%."
Here's the kicker: Google figured out the "20%"! My God, can you think of anyone else who acheived this?
My standard set of quick-links:
- Google
- Slashdot
- Games.yahoo.com
- Linux Today
- Kuro5hin
- My Netscape (another throw-away email)
- My Yahoo
Google is where I go to find information. It's invaluable for tracking down drivers and various technical stuff. News.google.com is awesome and I've started using it as a web home page on some browser profiles. Images.google.com definately has it's occasional uses (You can find images of just about any car, animal, famous (or not) people, etc, etc). Google is a information finding powerhouse.Slashdot, well, you know. We are here.
Yahoo is more for entertainment. Games.yahoo.com has plenty of card games and lots of people on it (I love card games). I use mail on Yahoo and it's my longest-standing email address. Before Google, Yahoo really was by far my favorite. Unfortunately, now that Yahoo has bloated out and started grabbing for cash by implementing little "pay for this", "pay for that" everywhere (personals, ladder gaming in particular) the service has definately regressed IMHO.
To Google: Keep going. You are doing a good job. Don't sell out and keep pumpin out that data!
To Yahoo: Take a look back. You used to be so nice. You brought light to the big scary internet for me. Now you are there only so I can play Sheepshead and check spam.
Is this true? I don't know, but it is certainly possible.
MBA
Now, where have I heard that before?
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
This strikes me as an ego thing. Yahoo thinks it's a search site and thinks it should be the BEST search site.
Instead, it truly is a "portal" that offers a bunch of services in a "nice" wrapper -- ONE being search.
Google provides ONLY search and it does it really well. Yahoo should use google.
This is like news.yahoo.com forgoing all AP/Reuters/NY Times/ other sources of information and going into the news gathering business.
It doesn't make any sense!
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Back when yahoo's directory MEANT something (at least 6 years ago), it was the most navigable index to the web, and it was one of the better ways to search it. If yahoo could make an index as complete, or nearly so, as Google's and make it as browseable as their index was/is, they would have a google-slayer. A heirarchical index allows you to look for topics without having key words (and the RIGHT key words, ones which exclude things you DONT want...searching, even with google, is an art which resides largely in the PERSON)...it allows you to more often find interesting or important stuff you wouldn't have otherwise found.
DMOZ/Google Directory is not that good.
Yahoo can regain the title by doing what they USED to do best well enough to compete with what Google does.
kinda reminds me of when they looked like this and actually were the #1 search engine ...
m /
http://web.archive.org/web/19961017/www2.yahoo.co
Yep, those were the days. Notice how clean and "google-esque" it truly was? Hmm... could the return to their roots? Perhaps if they're willing to get rid of the cruft. Portals suck. Search engines are useful. Don't confuse "portal" with "search engine" Yahoo, don't.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Unfortunately, Google's home page is still not W3C compliant. They don't put in a doctype, which is the first problem, and few of the HTML tag attributes are quoted, resulting in 53 HTML errors.
I'd be much happier if they added 100 bytes or so to the page to make it completely W3C-compliant -- it's not that hard to do, and it would make them have one more bragging right over Yahoo and the others.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
google - a mathematical term for ten to the hundredth power, famously first uttered by a mathematician's infant child.
;)
you could try and google it, but you'll find a bunch of stuff on the search engine instead. Try a dictionary.
Yahoo lost - plain an simple. There is no way they can even regain credibility wit hthe people who have watched them grow over the years.
I have had a yahoo mail account since about '96 and in the begining it was a great amil service.
but now they are riddled with ads - they attemtpt to reset your preferences without notifiying you that changes have been made etc..
Their tactics have gotten downright scummy.
for example - I have had DSL at home for about 3 or 4 years now. The whole time I have also used my yahoo account extensively. Recently SBC and Yahoo went into a deal to promote their cobranded DSL service.. now when I log into Yahoo Mail from home - it sees that I am coming from an SBC DSL IP or host - and redirects me to a full page ad for their SBC Yahoo service before letting me into my account.
Now this wouldnt be so bad if I had signed up for DSL on the cobranded package and GOTTEN THE SPECIAL RATE$ - but I have not - I have had DSL since before the deal that they went into, and as far as I am concerned - I should be given the special rate if they are going to force me to watch these ads...
so far my calls to SBC have gotten nowhere.
too bad for yahoo I could care less if they go out of business or not. I sure as hell wont support them.
I just checked out the new Yahoo! search. Guess what you'll see if you scroll to the bottom of the search results page? Yup, "Search Technology provided by Google".
Type in your search with the word "blog" removed. For example, say you are searching for "littlegreenfootballs" (a popular weblog). In your google search, type in this:
.....or any variation of the weblog word (blog, blogger, etc...). Try it with and without the exclusion and you'll see a difference.
littlegreenfootballs -weblog
This may not be the best solution, but I think it will help.
I "googled" and "yahoo'ed" for "african languages", and the search results seemed to be the same for both (at least for the first 10 or so, didn't check further than that). Guess they've figured out a very similar algorithm, or else they've just licensed google's search technology (ha ha). Oh wait, at the bottom of the Yahoo page: "Search Technology provided by Google"! Haha, Yahoo search is just google search.
Yahoo puts 20 results on the page by default, which IMO is nicer than the default 10 at a time from google, but the Yahoo results page looks ugly and messy and confusing to the eye, just a mess of links.
Put it in yer hosts file and it's easier than that long ass Reg Key
64.28.67.150 s #slashdot.org
216.239.33.100 g #google.com
those are just a few of the ones in my hosts file
add those lines anywhere and then you dont have to have it be Browser specific "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer"
but then again I use Phoenix and just have google, and slahdot as different tabs specified as my homepage so they both load when I start Phoenix
"http://www.yahoo.com | http://www.google.com | http://www.slashdot.org"
moo.
For my clients i always set mozilla's start page to yahoo in their new / updated pc with a yahoo mail account (just to shove it to MSN / Hotmail) and additional bookmarks on the personal toolbar to the https yahoo mail login and a google link. Of course the default mozilla search engine gets set to google.
stocks;
That was when I stopped using Yahoo. When every time you search, you get an X10 pop-up. When Google does that, I'll switch to altavista...
Yahoo peed on itself with its inferior search algorithm, and even without their ads, the results still seem tainted.
stuff |
or more accurately
Yaaaaaaaaaahoo! >
12345678910 Next
I've seen this at management-focused companies as well: middle managers and "product" people are under the gun to produce quarterly results, while sucking up to technically unskilled senior managers who see search as a commodity to be "improved" by marketing bombardment. To an MBA, everything looks like a marketing problem.
These people define the word "short term". They come up with ideas like simply raising fees or selling listings to raise revenue, getting a short-term gain until the market inelasticity is used up and people move elsewhere, and the company is forced to come up with another bright idea.
Technological development on the order of Google requires an investment in knowledge and research that companies like Yahoo would have trouble even conceiving. The company farmed out everything technical (at one point they were even in discussions to farm out the production of their directory). Their main contribution to search technology seems to be the sub-200 ms response time, since user surveys indicated that the main selling point for a search engine was how fast it came up with results.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
The reason i made this was because I hated pictures on the initial search page with a 28.8 modem. All i wanted was a box to type in and a button to push. Is that hard to accomplish or something? :/
http://search.wickens.ws
Or turn cookies off, and use a proxy. Two permanent settings that defeat googles ability to see where I'm clicking. To do this with Yahoo, I would have to right click *every link I choose to foolow* and save link location, paste in into the location box and manually remove the tracking information.
This would also allow better targeting for SPAM^H^H^H^H "Targeted email advertisements." Not that this would be a bad thing. Maybe if spammers were even a little bit more discriminate, some of us wouldn't have to implement client side filters. Not to mention the bandwidth utilization problem.
"Search Technology provided by Google"
You should use a better proxy. A better proxy, such as Proximotron, can take the Yahoo! search result URLs and strip out everything before the destination URL.
It's true that not all search engines use such redirection, but there are proxy solutions for all of your tinfoil-hat needs.
For more information, click here.
Do you Fahoo?
--
As read in the Globe and Mail: Frodo failed, Bush has the one ring...
Neither have something that Alta Vista has had for over eight years. It's the "NEAR" operator. It's very nice to use when searching for something like "Linux NEAR Beowolf." You don't really want the exact phrase "Linux Beowolf," but anything that mentions Linux near Beowolf is probably close to what you want. Come-on Google, add it and I can stop using Alta Vista forever!
Not many people can create sophistication through simplicity and as Leonardo da Vinci said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication".
Google is simple yet very sophisticated. A company like Yahoo does not have the creative power in their resources to even try to compete with Google. Yahoo is a company run by stuck up rich shareowners. The creativity at Yahoo got lost with the dot com boom.
If I knew where there was A remote one, I would.
Running a local proxy still allows "them" to record your IP number.
Bouncing off one (or more) proxies via proxys4all
makes "them" have to get at least two search warrants. Cause that's what they hate.
Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean Admiral Poindexter doesn't want to know all about my surfing habits.
Thank Goodness for This
dmoz.org?
Also provides content for the Google Directory.
All human-edited, of course, which was what Yahoo was once so proud of.
this is nothing new whatsoever. yahoo.com has been doing this for years. why is anonymous data tracking so scary? do you think yahoo really cares that you are searching "marry me buffy"?
Maybe Google should provide free email, and elminate Yahoo! entirely...
The day I felt that Google had "made it" was when Yahoo! licenced their search technology. Look here if you didn't know.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Yahoo's reputation is terrible with me, I will always go to a Yahoo!'s competitor first if I'm looking for kind of service they offer. For example, when I was searching where to host a mailing list I chose the second result that google returned (and it turned out to have clean and lean interface).
It's new to me, I use google.
The fact that they think they will be able to take users away from google by (or while) tracking their browsing habits is a bit far fetched to me.
And It's not anonymous if you are logged in to yahoo. Unless you log out, disable cookies, reboot your ISP connection until you have a new IP, then perform your search.
The funny thing is I wasn't a Tin Foil Hat wearing privacy nut until my government decided they wanted to Track everyone's online habits And Hold them completely waiving Habeus Corpus
And Buffy will marry me, don't mock my love.
This is what I love about
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Crack smoking mods again? I could see this being marked off-topic, maybe, but it is an interesting question and clearly not a troll. (I have nothing to say in answer to it, however.)
Sorry, but if you are not tracking what your users are doing, you cannot learn from them. You cannot improve services based on tracking data. You are essentially blind. Not tracking is just stupid, and Google will surely track once they get around to it.
if the personals ad says "i am a stewardess coming to your town soon!"...then its a hooker. if you are that stupid you deserve to get played.
There is a reason they index Y News. It is the fastest updating site for major wire feeds. Also, Yahoo's servers can survive any "slashdotting". Also, they spit out predictable html across a number of feeds, making it easier to parse.
it's a reference to the 'beat' generation, beatniks, jack kerouac (sp?) and so on..
Who wants to remember that escape-x-alt-control-left shift-b puts you into
super-edit-debug-compile mode?
-- Discussion on the intuitiveness of commands, especially Emacs
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