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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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When they finally put web interfaces in my brain, will the popup adds cause migraines?