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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.
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:)
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.
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)
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.
I should add that I am not anti-competitive. I am merely saying that yahoo is old, like 1990's old. Google is a teen, and like another reader pointed out, Google Labs is innovating while others are trying to catch up. (I could say another thing, but i would get modded into oblivion :) )
ditto
First of all, Google does not have ADS as far as I know.
Well that comment just proves how well Google has managed to weave ads into their result pages without alienating/annoying people! It's a pity that more sites don't take the hint and remove the pop-up/pop-under/flash-within hell that drives people away from their pages.
The ads that REALLY drive me nuts now are those f*cking embedded Flash animations that appear over the top of the content I'm trying to read! Who, honestly, thought those would be a good idea? Better still, who actually ever lets one of those ads play out before hitting the (usually randomly located) close buttons?
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
...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.
His comment just goes to show how unobtrusive the ads are. They're not jumping out at you, but if you know they're there, you can check them out.
The problem is that Yahoo CAN'T match Google without completely gutting their business model and starting over. Yahoo has significantly less hits per search than google and if they are still doing that stupid-idea of manual reviewing of each entry to the database as they once "proudly" flaunted they are completely doomed.
If they can do better then that is great, but I highly doubt it unless they have a major trick up their sleeve the google engine cant be beat. (Yahoo is also rife with "paid placement" and forced placement so that a page that really shouldnt' be on the first page of returned results shows up there... making a search engine completely useless as soon as they start taking money for preferred placement.
what's next? the phone company offiering me a chance to get my name listed in the front of the book before the A's? that would make the book useless in a short time, same way it makes yahoo useless.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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.
You're not forced to see the Flash advertisements, you know...
Whenever you come across some annoyance on the web - pop-ups, stupid Flash sequences, blinking text, or whatever - don't blame the individual site, instead blame the badly designed web browser that allows sites to inflict these things on you.
No I'm not "forced" to if I visit the site frequently - I can assign it to a zone (with Explorer) that prevents scripting/flash etc. I don't have Flash installed on Mozilla, so it's not an issue there. However, if I'm visiting a site for the first time, I won't know about it until it's splattered across the page!
Your suggestion to cripple my browser by disabling everything is just ludicrous, BTW. I DO blame the individual site - Flash itself is not the problem, I enjoy a lot of Flash sites so why the hell should I disable it because some coke-head in "Web annoyances inc." dreamed up this latest marketing tool to piss of the public at large?
I assume you disable images etc since they're used to insert huge ads in pages too? After all, it's not the fault of those sites, but those evil gif/jpg/png files!!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I just submitted a site to yahoo this morning. They are still manually reviewing everything.
but the image isn't loaded everytime. Particularly if they return to google multiple times in one browsing session.
So the light entry page really does help google feel fast.
I prefer news.yahoo.com, which has been around far longer than Google News and has a large array of sources all in one consistent interface. Google News is great when you want to read the same story from 100 sources (nice for movie reviews) but Yahoo! News has the same content from a smaller but still broad number of sources.
Also, Froogle is horrible compared to Yahoo! Shopping. Froogle indexes many pages that are not stores, while Yahoo! Shopping searches Yahoo's own list of stores. Again, Yahoo has tighter control over the content but the experience is better for it.
For more information, click here.
I went to Yahoo's front page just now (first time in a LONG time I'd been there) and what did I get: jobs, chat, travel, ads, directories, ads, news, ads, groups, ads... It's a mess, frankly. A positive assessment would be "one stop shop," which is I'm sure what they want me to think, but my reaction is "you can do twelve things at once but they're all badly done."
A few cumulative hours of research and a well-organized favorites list makes a Portal completely redundant. Yahoo! would never exist if they tried to start up today with their business model. What they have now is name recognition, leftover juice from the bubble, and a certain amount of inertia.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
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.
I personally would be disappointed if they changed. My only problem was that they dropped Google as the secondary search engine which means I now generally keep switching between the two. Indeed, the only reason Google is physically more convenient to me is that a quick search via it comes preinstalled in most Mozilla based browsers.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
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
I thought that smacked of condescension, as if they had a problem with me using their site because it was free.
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.
Indeed that's a round number, that's the furthest to the future a date can be when using a 32-bit millisecond counter starting from the Unix epoch (00:00 Jan 1, 1970)
:)
Spooky.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
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 +
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
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?
The X10 camera ads were what did me in. The whole "Spy on women" angle was offensive. The method of delivery (pop-under) was offensive.
Haven't been there much since, and definitely not without Mozilla, so I haven't noticed much. Do they still issue pop-unders?
It's too bad Yahoo has sunk so far from grace - they could have taken a stand on advertising policies.
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...
Actually, if they got rid of some deprecated elements and did more formatting with CSS, they'd probably save 100 bytes or so, not gain it. Six align=center could be replaced with a single style rule.
The table layout could be replaced with posisioned div's, which should save seven instances of <td> </td> and other needless table tag mess. Not to mention that the logo is in a single-celled table all by itself. Why??
And if it were designed well, it could deprecate nicely for Netscape 4 and earlier or even Lynx! Google currently looks pretty crappy in Lynx.
But, for standards compliance to become the norm, a few high profile sites (like Google) are going to have to lead the way, so that it becomes something of a bragging right to have a standards compliant page. Who knows, with enough high profile sites leading the way, maybe we'd even achieve my dream of browsers refusing to render non-compliant pages (not likely, as long as MSIE is the dominant browser).
So, to answer your question, there probably isn't too much direct advantage, other than bragging rights, that Google would gain from making thier site conform to W3C standards. However, a small gesture such as that from a popular site like Google could go a long way in making the web better for everyone.
Alan
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...)
- !DOCTYPE - This is redundant in a simple HTML page, because small pages have a low enough tag vocabulary that it is unnecessary to say which tags are used. Seriously, all web browsers will treat text/html's as HTML, and parse accordiningly, without requiring that redundant document type declaration. Strict, loose, whatever -- its all HTML, all the tags are the same.
- Unquoted Attributes - These are heavily unnecessary. The only time a tag attribute needs to be quoted is if it contains non-identifier characters, or less strictly, spaces or quotes. No web browsers complain about unquoted attributes, and in my opinion unnecessary quoting is harmful and wasteful. SGML-derived languages already have a reputation for being bloated, HTML does not need to exacerbate this fact.
I'm all for standards-compliance, but Google displays well in all browsers. You don't have to worry about annoying features like frames, iframes, layers, ilayers, active scripting, applets, active content, multimedia, popups. Google doesn't abuse any of those. Its HTML is relatively standard, within reason.Instead of changing Google to fit the standards, the standards should be changed to fit Google.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare