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.

Comments

pah, yahoo.com is totally useless

[grazzy]

google has a clean and fast interface, i dont want to load 10kb of bloat every time i enter a keyword to search for.

Re:pah, yahoo.com is totally useless

[rf0]

Google takes the its liteness very seriously. In an interview someone from google said that they kept recieving emails with numbers in it. One week 54, the next week 56. They finally worked out it was someone saying how may words appeared on the title page. Since then they've purposly kept it low

Rus

Re:pah, yahoo.com is totally useless

[arvindn]

Grandparent: google has a clean and fast interface, i dont want to load 10kb of bloat every time i enter a keyword to search for.

Parent:One week 54, the next week 56. They finally worked out it was someone saying how may words appeared on the title page. Since then they've purposly kept it low

Have you noticed that the size of the google logo is 8.5 KB?!?

Of course I understand fully well that google's liteness is a major factor in its favor but the point I'm trying to make is that:

• You're downloading more than you think you are
• The decrease in the number of words has nothing to do with bandwidth but is to keep users from getting confused/annoyed.

Re:Google tech already on yahoo?

[Flounder]

They did, until they realized that they were giving Google more business. So, they bought Inktomi and used that instead, thinking that the market share of Google would drop. Didn't work.

Google Vs. Yahoo vs. MS

[luzrek]

NPR has a blurb about this too. IMO (nothing humble about it) both Yahoo and MS have a really big hurdle to get over. Google was the first really effective search engine, with enforceable patents on their methods. Both Yahoo and MS will have to either pay Google for its patents or come up with a completely different but equally effective technology. And any new technology will likely be tested against Google so if it comes up with different results it will be judged not as good. Yahoo and MS won't suceed in ousting Google, but they will suceed in developing new technologies so competition is still good.

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).

Its far too late in the day...

[BlightThePower]

...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.

Google specials vs. yahoo specials

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

Yahoo vs Google

[DeadSea]

Yahoo says they are trying to make their search smarter, but they still don't do many of the things google does.

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.

Re:Remember the Labs....

[skillet-thief]

Inertia does matter among web users, yet people can change really quickly. I'm sure that within 6 months, some upstart search engine could take the world by storm. However, I doubt that Yahoo will be that search engine, since whatever they do will be bogged down by their other commercial strategies. I guess you could call that corporate inertia.

The other big question is whether people will start using the Google spinoff services or not. I'm not sure that many people will get beyond the initial main Google search page.

text browsing.

[rf0]

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

I almost like Yahoo.

[ojQj]

I'm probably an idiot for saying this on slashdot, but I use Yahoo's portal for e-mail, stock quotes, exchange rates, and customized headlines, and there are a lot of things I like about it. I've been looking for a replacement to Yahoo, because an incident with them a few months ago caused them to loose my trust, but I haven't been able to find one that had all of the above (Lycos has everything but the exchange rates and it's been my closest match up till now).

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.)

Re:According to alexa.com Yahoo is still Number 1

[Andy Tanenbaum]

First of all, these stats that you cite were generated only from a sample that uses the Alexa Toolbar. This may not be a truly representative sample. Secondly, this battle between Yahoo and Google is regarding internet searches, not email, online games, chat, etc. Yahoo offers all of these extra services, and Google offers none. Much of the traffic which puts Yahoo at #1 on this list could be for these extra services.

Re:Ya-who?

[jmb-d]

...and in Opera, type "g item of interest" in the location bar, and *poof* there's your Google search results.

Sweeeeeet.

The number 1 thing I need is trust.

[Futurepower(R)]

"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.

Re:The number 1 thing I need is trust.

[squiggleslash]

Clearly it isn't Yahoo doing this, but Yahoo's advertisers.

I wonder exactly how possible it'd be for Yahoo to set standards that its advertisers would have to follow. For Yahoo, presumably there'd be a tradeoff between more people coming vs a lower number of groups wanting to advertise and hence, quite probably, advertising revenues falling despite the larger number of eyeballs.

Which, to me, says yet again Yahoo and others need to look into other sources of revenue aside from advertising. To their credit, with some specific services they're doing this, but they're still not willing to go the whole way and offer users something like a $25/per year method of logging in and being advertising free.

It's a shame Salon is struggling as it has the right model, but the absurd overheads it has based on decisions it made during the 1990s means that the right model is being discredited, being associated with a company that is apparently on the verge of going out of business. (Ironically, the only thing that's probably saved it this year is a war that the bulk of the people associated with it and majority of its readers clearly see as a bad thing.)

Re:The number 1 thing I need is trust.

[DuckDuckBOOM!]

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.

Agreed, and here's a good example: The links from Yahoo's search result pages, both old and new, are referers which appear to contain session IDs; i.e., Yahoo has at least the capability of tracking your search activity, and the links you select. Google's, for the most part, are direct links. (The paid listings and such are referers, which I suppose they must be in order for Google to get paid. ;)
Not that any of this is surprising. Yahoo's directors need a little abuse with the Almighty Clue Stick (tm) to the effect that, in addition to its technological prowess, integrity and class play a substantial role in Google's success. It's quite refreshing to see a corporation make money (last I heard, anyway,) without having to whore itself and/or pimp its customers to hit its quarterly earnings targets. Long may it reign.

byte misers

[Spy Hunter]

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).

Re:byte misers

[corz]

I was looking at it just the other day and noticed that the and closing tags were missing. I just found that interesting, and wonder if it was done deliberately.

Re:byte misers

[poot_rootbeer]

Have you ever used "View Source" on the google homepage?

It's the best 3,736 bytes on the web.

The only place I could find for improvement would be to remove the comment tags within the style and script tags. They're in the head of the document, so there's really no need to put them in comments for the benefit of older browsers -- browsers aren't supposed to use tags in the head as display content anyway.

Then again, both the style and the script tags really SHOULD specify what language their content is -- browsers default to CSS and Javascript, but why rely on defaults?

Re:two different tools

[rbolkey]

Unfortunately for yahoo, that's basically what I used the dmoz-based Google directory for. Shoot, I even check my spelling with Google (hint hint Taco).

Re:Ads.

[peter_gzowski]

So your solution is to not run flash? Then I couldn't watch Strong Bad! Strangely, the sound in flash often goes off when I listen to xmms, even after I close xmms. If someone knows why this is, please let me know (using esound w/ nvaudio driver for sound card). But this is besides the point. If you want to block flash ads, I think the following lines in the
ever-so-handy userContent.css file will do it:

embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"][widt h= "468"][height="60"] {
display: none !important;
visibility: hidden !important;
}

embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"][widt h= "728"][height="90"] {
display: none !important;
visibility: hidden !important;
}

Making It Pay v.s. Making It Work

[akadruid]

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...

Google use by "the masses"

[lvdrproject]

I'm not sure how relevant this is, but....

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? :(

Re:It's going to be tough...

[Schnapple]

That's something interesting I hadn't thought of before. Google got all scared that the term "google" would become a verb - or at least they're tepid about the idea that it would become such a verb as to become unbreakably synonymous with "search". But Yahoo! had a series of ads with the "Do You Yahoo!?" tagline (they even got sued for the yoedeling) and they desparately wanted "yahoo" to become a verb. One wants it but can't get it, the other has it and doesn't want it.

Of course "yahoo" was already a slang term ("some yahoo tried to sell me this...") whereas "google" is a made up word, a "beatles"-esque pun on the spelling on "googol".

Just cheat like they do in personals & auction

[adzoox]

I'm sure Yahoo can figure out a sinister way to "make money once again" for their search engine like they have found so lucrative for their personals and auctions.

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.

New features include tracking where you click!!!

[Fapestniegd]

Why does a search for "linux" return a link to:
http://srd.yahoo.com/S=2766679:WS1/R=1/K=linu x/SS= 82593/OCS=82532/H=0/T=1049724247/F=e248244e7fc465e 82c9bf12c25f246e6/*http://www.linux.org/
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?

Search Engine or portal?

[muffen]

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!

News on Google vs. News on Yahoo

[Theaetetus]

Google's News: Quick loading (though not as quick as Google's main page), provides every top story, updated minute-ly, with links to alternate sources from around the world about every story so that you can get alternate points of view...
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

This post is late to the party, but...

[aengblom]

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!

oh yeah

[cr@ckwhore]

kinda reminds me of when they looked like this and actually were the #1 search engine ...

http://web.archive.org/web/19961017/www2.yahoo.com /

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.

Google still not W3C-compliant...

[SlashChick]

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.

Re:Correction. Google is not a made up word

[Schnapple]

And the reason that you won't find references to mathmatics when you google "Google" is because that's not how you spell it.

"googol" is the math term. "google" is an intentional mis-spelling of the math term.

And I never got the idea of "beat"les, I just figured Lennon was trying to be silly.

Re:Correction. Google is not a made up word

[ShadowDrake]

10^100 has 101 characters. You can fit it on one line with a sufficiently narrow fixed-width font (the sort one would use to print 132 chars/line in the good old days)

OTOH, a googolplex is a more interesting proposition. 10^100+1 characters, at about 6000 per page....