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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.
google has a clean and fast interface, i dont want to load 10kb of bloat every time i enter a keyword to search for.
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.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
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 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.
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.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
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
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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.
"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?" `":" #");}
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).
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
t h= "468"][height="60"] {
t h= "728"][height="90"] {
ever-so-handy userContent.css file will do it:
embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"][wid
display: none !important;
visibility: hidden !important;
}
embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"][wid
display: none !important;
visibility: hidden !important;
}
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
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? :(
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".
Schnapple
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?
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!
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.
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"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.
Schnapple