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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.
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:)
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
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
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.
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.
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
>First of all, Google does not have ADS as far as I know.
Oh man, lets at least pretend text ads work. Anything to keep the gifs and flash away.
Try:
"Oh yes, text ads are great! I click on them all the time!"
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.
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).
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
#1 result for "search engine" in google: google.com
#2: yahoo.com
#1 result for "search engine" in yahoo: google.com
#2: yahoo.com
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 a little register hack which allows me to type
........
....... on google. :P
= UTF-8&q=%s"
.reg
G
in my IE search bar to search for
REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\g] @="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe
just copy and paste that into a notepad doc, and save as a
"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?" `":" #");}
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
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.
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? :(
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.
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 . . .
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!
Google search for "The Worst Search Engine" comes back with MSN as the third entry. A couple of days back it was the first entry.
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
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.
they still think they're only the FIFTH best search engine.
amusingly, even yahoo thinks Google is the best in the world
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?
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
/old/ Yahoo!. There is a link there pointing to the /New/ Yahoo! search, which is way cleaner.
While I agree, you were looking at the
You should check this.
While better than the old Y!, I still trust in Google to continue being King of the Hill for a while.
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!
"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