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Yahoo to Dump Google
unassimilatible writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting (paid subscription required) that Yahoo! plans to dump Google as its primary search technology. In a major revamp, Yahoo will also add personalization and customization features to extend the usefulness of searches and expand its use of "paid inclusion." Yahoo news has picked up the story. Might be time to rethink that IPO."
My only question: How will this affect google's searching power?
Yahoo owns both Inktomi and Overture... for them to be dumping Google and moving to the suppliers that they own outright is something that was easy to see coming, the only question was when.
You're kidding me. I can't remember the last time I ever bothered using Yahoo!'s search function. It had to have been sometime back in '98 I'm sure.
The problem with Google now is that it has almost entirely been taken over by commercial entities. When I was recently shopping for a digital camera, I did the usual internet searches. A few years back, similar searches would have found lots and lots of sites ABOUT the product in question (fan sites, discussion forums, reviews). Now I have to sort through page upon page of sites wanting to sell me said item, most of which aren't even actual store-fronts but instead just referral pages which have manipulated the Google ranking system to get on top. I recenlty hit the same problem when doing vacation planning. It used to be that I could easily find hundreds of pages ABOUT the destination, now I just find sites wanting to sell me airfare, book me into a hotel, and rent me a car. It's become extremely frustrating and has made Google far less useful than it once was. In fact, most of the big search engines are far less useful than they once were.
Yahoo used to be THE place to get organized info on any subject. Maybe they are switching to a better search engine, like DMOZ or Vivisimo?
Yahoo to Dump Google. [...] Yahoo picks up the story
Yeah, I guess they'd have first dibs on the story, eh?
Is complete horseshit especially when you can find other links. Take for instance this link.
Enjoy the reading fellow /.ers.
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
Because of Yahoo? Nah. Google better rethink their IPO because their technology has been broken by spammers. Searching with google used to be a lot more fruitful in the old days. Anything searches that could be construed as porn or is sold on Amazon.com is going to yield tons of useless links.
"...Yahoo will switch from Google to its own technology as early as the first quarter."
If Yahoo is going live with a search engine that soon, why haven't I seen a bot on my site (google page rank of 5, so not obscure) which looks Yahoo-ish? Anyone else spotted a bot you think might belong to yahoo?
Read reviews of shopping cart software
This will hurt Yahoo a lot more than it will hurt Google. Google's search technology is very advanced, once you weed through the garbage links. Yahoo, before they used Google technology, would usually take forever to find any relevant results. Yahoo will go back to being the search engine with huge name recognition and little effective use.
Yeah, I definately think that people at Yahoo should really rethink it's IPO if they're going to drop the only thing that makes it relevant. If they expect to float along with their cheesy messaging and other crapware they're in for big trouble.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Yahoo! plans to dump Google as its primary search technology.
It was convenient to be able to googlewash several search engines at the same time.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I believe the author of this post doens't realize that this was probably in response to Google's IPO. As a close partner, Google probably would have been obliged to mention this to Yahoo; certainly everyone speculated about it.
Might be time to rethink that IPO
You mean because Yahoo are dropping Google? Man, *that* was unexpected, no-one knew that was coming.
Seriously, if that's your reason, then you (or they) obviously didn't do any thinking or research in the first place.
As for Yahoo fighting back, I didn't see *that* coming either.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
It would matter a little if Yahoo was going back to whatever proprietary search they had before Overture, but if they're just hosting paid links, I think that only makes Google's product stronger.
stuff |
It will be interesting to see what this develops into. I'm already a bit uncomfortable with the thought of such a "service." While it may be "convenient" to create a profile of your interests and perhaps an overview of previous searches and marking of what were "good" search results, I don't like the idea of Yahoo! storing all this data in the first place. How do I know that they won't sell this data to marketers? (Most privacy policies are bullshit.) Or give it to government officials looking for terrorists and political opponents and the such? Will I have to give up a lot of personal data in order to get search for information results that don't lead me to sites that try to sell me the product I'm trying to research?
Thanks, but for now I think I'll stick to spending time and effort to get the search results I want, no matter how big of a pain in the ass it is, rather than sell my soul for the same.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
Yahoo was a lot more important in my surfing habits back, say, 5-6 years ago. Google has that important niche in my surfing habits now, and I know that goes for a lot of people. How the submitter labeled this as some event possibly disastrous for Google is beyond me.
Why is it time to rethink that IPO? Losing Yahoo as a paying customer will not hurt very much. There will just be another one to take their place. Google makes great search appliances for networks. They are gaudy yellow boxes, but they work very well. There is plenty of money in that. Look at all this other stuff they can sell. They can sell advertising, search appliances, they can let you use their engine to search your site, and they can park domains for you. How will losing one customer on one sector of their business hurt them (badly)? Their eggs are not all in one basket. That would be like everyone saying "Ford is dying!" when someone stops buying their air freshener.
I hate sigs.
If Yahoo does move to something else then it will at least drive google to keep improving or for something new and better to come along. The internet is about constant development and this can be seen to be a good thing Rus
CPanel + Root from $35/mo - 10% off with discount code SLASHDOT
It is as well to bear in mind at this point that while Yahoo started out as a classified directory and became a search engine, the search engine probably isnt such a big deal for them these days. They left it behind when they became a portal. Remember portals?:) Services like Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Mail, Geo5h1tties, Yahoo personals etc etc all join the search engine to make up the greater Yahoo portal. I am guessing that most Yahoo users rarely use it for searching these days.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
Someone mod this guy funny...
I remember back before 'yahoo.com' when they were on Berkeley's server ( I think... I could look it up but the school isn't important ) and I had to rummage around for the address when I wanted to use it... nowadays I'd just google for it and have it immediately. Back then it was actually useful... almost no commercial content, the database was smaller (more accurate checking) and younger (not so full of crap). Nowadays they have everything under the sun, and I'm sure I'm not the only one that finds it useless as a result. Even something simple like a stock price lookup I won't go to Yahoo for anymore, because whatever I want is buried amongst movie times and online games and auctions, etc. To me Yahoo spread its wings too far and they were melted by the sun (or am I mixing a few parables together...)
Yahoo is the only site that I've found that really uses personalization. The "one login" promise that countless technologies were supposed to deliver on has been delivered by Yahoo. Forget LDAP and various XML schemes. I love Yahoo because no matter where I go in their empire, my login is good and the content is for me. I actually enjoy using Yahoo's various properties. In one day, I use their mail (excellent with spam), launch.com (streaming radio), their auctions, their weather, their finance, etc. I've been using the web since before the web, and Yahoo is the only place I've found that really delivers on that promise of personalization, which happens to be worth a lot to me because it saves me a lot of time and headache.
Same post here yesterday.
Now go to your room!
"If I have been able to see so far, It is because I went out and bought a damn binoculars" - Ze da Esquina
Because google has the best search technology there is and the best there will ever be. Any attempt at innovation must surely be folly.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
When Yahoo switched to Google as its primary search engine, it made Yahoo into nothing more than a Google frontend with a lot of wasted bandwidth on its pages. It was just google with a bloated site loaded to bear with ads, as if it was an MSN with a google search bar. Its only real difference in searching was those old directories with all the outdated pages from the 1990s.
Now that Yahoo will be using another search technology, there might be a reason for using Yahoo again. Some useful things that may never show up on Google might show up on Yahoo, so it might make for a useful alternate search engine now, especially if Google continues to slide as it's doing. Then again, we still have old Astalavista for that, as well.
"Might be time to rethink that IPO?"
You're kidding me. I can't remember the last time I ever bothered using Yahoo!'s search function.
The issue of Yahoo dumping Google has nothing to do with whether Yahoo sucks or not. Instead, this is an issue of Google's long-term business outlook. Google is partially dependent on large contracts from major portals like Yahoo and Google also faces the potential of losing to another search engine provider.
As wonderful as Google is now, it is in a very risky industry. The fact that search sites like Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, etc. can go from darling to moribund suggests that the industry has high turnover. And then there is Microsoft which has expressed interest in competing with Google.
Were Google publically traded right now, this news would create a major hit to the stock price. This suggests that any potential buyers of Google IPO stock should think long and hard about the likelihood of expecting more unexpected bad news.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Wow, how did you find that, Google?
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Yes nothing beats the search engine power of the dollar for paid links.
THat is the search technology they will have, and even more so for shareholder...
Google will die by being over commercialised. They have froggle for paid links but now they polluted the main engine.
They need to specalize the engines. Wont happen.
MS will knock em.
Yahoo! plans to dump Google as its primary search technology.
The word primary is very important here. It implies that Yahoo! is not completely abandoning Google, but is making it second string instead. If they're still letting us access Google, even if it requires a couple of extra clicks, then I can't see this as entirely bad. I like Google and it's my first pick, but I certainly don't limit myself to Google...
I did not see in the article where Yahoo! is completely dropping Google. If it's in there, I missed it.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
It's not any better than altavista used to be, back when people complained "When you search for things, you always get tons of useless crap"..
The only good thing about google is that it often lists the official page of something first. But if you aren't looking for the official page, you are out of luck..
Google became popular because it listed extremely relevant results directly on the first results page, but it is in my experience a completely different beast nowadays..
Will code a sig generator for food
I never really understood why Yahoo! switched to Google in the first place. The point is to differentiate. I stopped going to Yahoo! when I saw it was powered by Google - I just went to the "source". Same deal with MapQuest.
I guess I just don't find value in the portal service Yahoo offers. I also don't shop at Wal-Mart. I would rather use my bookmarks bar to go the site I like for Investment tools, another for maps, another for searching, and another for e-mail.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Hehe! Nope!!!
Spent entire monday on slashdot... kind of slow around here!
And today doesn't seem to be getting any better!
"If I have been able to see so far, It is because I went out and bought a damn binoculars" - Ze da Esquina
It already is, maybe not in commercial terms but definitely in terms of usability.
They are trying to maintain their loyal users. They see that Google obviously has them beat hands down when it comes to searching, so they keep the "yahoo.com" in their users' URLs in hopes they will continue to stay for the other Yahoo services.
Now why are they dumping Google? That's a different story.
Insert offensive troll-style sig here. Please mod or respond appropriately.
You're an idiot.
And people gave you informative responses as to how to modify your searches to get what you want.
Go back to your karma brothel.
You've changed your link from nero-online's lastmeasure to happytreefriends.com? Can you get any more lame?
Most responders don't seem to notice that the article mentions Yahoo's acquisition of two search engines (Inktomi for searches and Overture for paid searches). Yahoo has always used an 'improved' version of google results; the search quality shouldn't be much worse. Yahoo is doing this for the money to be saved (by using their own acquired search technology) and gained (more and smarter paid listings).
Keep the "open this search result in a new window" link when you do; it's the major reason I search (nearly) exclusively with Yahoo! and almost rarely use plain Google.
And who am I to give advice to a big deal like Yahoo!? Nobody, really. Actually, I'm pretty much your average, everyday, run-of-the-mill nobody... of course, that's who makes up the vast majority of your user base...
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
That's why the grandparent post should have been modded funny not flamebait. It's called sarcasm, and I don't know why it's so hard for moderators to understand.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
The (IMO incredibly annoying) "Do you Yahoo!?" advertising aside, I note that I hear "google" used as a verb far more than "yahoo" (actually, short of the aforementionded annoying commercials, I've never heard "yahoo" used as a verb).
That's not just in conversation with my tech-geek acquaintances; I'm talking about popular culture, too (although I'm pressed to recall which shows I heard it on). The reason it stood out in my mind was that there were maybe two or three separate such usages in prime time the same week.
Granted, it could have been clever product placement rather than sniglet hipsterism on the part of the writers.
i don't actually use their search, but their directory is pretty nice, when you know the topic but would rather not figure out the proper wording to find it on google. that's not to say that other people's directories AREN'T, but i like yahoo's.
i'm probably an idiot too. dammit.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
stocks move faster than that. Yahoo had announced its intention to split from Google for some time, and signalled it for much longer. (You don't retain your internal search companies, and buy more search IP if you intend to use a 3rd party forever).
Google however is finding a larger market in advertising than it thought it could, and despite your claim makes most of its profit from smaller private contracts.
Yahoo is just about the -only- large portal contract they had. I mean, who else is there? And it was far from their only revenue source.
Yes, when this split happens, it would depress their share price, but I doubt it signals a longterm marketability problem. This is Yahoo prepping their investors to believe the impending split is in -their- best interests - instead of signalling that Yahoo itself can no longer afford to own search companies and still pay for Google.
After all, it's Yahoo that has been in a business tailspin for the last few years. Not Google.
And this won't bother their prospective IPO, as the large financial institutions that would have first shot at IPO shares have analysts that have known this plan for some time.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
You know how when you play risk... and you team up with one of your friends... you have to keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn't get too strong? If he gets too strong he might turn around and start pillaging your homeland... so you have to remain friends as long as possible and then pick the right moment to invade him... feigned disgust notwithstanding.
This is the same thing here... Yahoo teamed up with Google as long as the relationship was substantially beneficial to Yahoo. However... with Google's recent IPO... it is clear to the Yahoo suits that shareholders are going to want Google to "put out". This most likely would include a more full-figured search portal which would very likely ensure that Yahoo loses most of the armies it gets at the beginning of its turn and pretty eliminate any potential for new Risk cards. So Yahoo decided to screw Google first and try to solidify their position as the premier search portal for all the web refuse that isn't already part of the AOL empire.
. SLASHDOT: Home of the vicious nerd.
This means Yahoo's searches are more likely to be relevent when searching for entities and/or products, and Google's is likely to find more hits and be useful for non-entity based searches (ie "Linux ES1371 driver")
So it makes sense for Yahoo to "fallback" to Google once its directory has been searched. This makes Yahoo's search more useful than it'd be if it just searched the Yahoo directory alone.
Now, of course, Yahoo also owns a couple of random keyword based search engines, so a good question is why aren't they doing those? But in this case, the comparison is more like KFC selling Coca-cola (KFC is owned by Pepso) than KFC selling Chicken McNuggets from MacDonalds.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Will online services like Etrade or Ameritrade work or do I need to see some high-falutin' specialized meat-body in realspace to do it?
Yahoo also had an article about a guy from the future coming back to play the stock market.
" I never really understood why Yahoo! switched to Google in the first place. "A greed, they bought Inktomi, they (can) have their own shop.....
Julius Caesar - Act I, Scene i: "What mean'st thou by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow!"
I agree wholeheartedly. Used to be you could get unbiased, decent information about nearly anything, but nowadays if you search for anything remotely 'commercial' you get page after page of spam, cloaked pages, and other bait-and-switch scams webmasters us to take over the top rankings.
Google is still very good, however, for getting technical help with linux and unix based systems, and other technical info in general.
Yahoo news has picked up the story
Yahoo News picked up the story that Yahoo was in the news? Now *that's* some good searching technology! You can bet I'll be using them to search news!
I would've thought by now the conspiracy theorists would've suggested that Microsoft paid off Yahoo! to dump Google as their search technology in an effort to disrupt their IPO announcement.
How hard is it to just type "google.com" in the box up top? Actually, since I use Safari, I just type my Google query in the search box up top :)
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Google is still the best to skip pr0n passwords.
(Just click the www.mydailymovie.com/members/ link in the google results page)
I could care less, but not without a lobotomy
It seems like DMOZ (where people actually go and check the usefulness of a given site) may be the only way forward.
Search engines should be able to harness the collective willigness of people to create useful resources, otherwise we are condemned to be flooded by spam.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Let's face it, you and I both know the only reason Yahoo went with google in the first place was because they were getting their rears kicked in the search engine business. Using google allowed them to put some proper research into it, take their time, and use their own good engine once they had it built. Thanks a lot google! I finished with you baby, your money's on the dresser! Pablo
http://www.cgff.net/comics.html
Inktomi and Overture's bots belong to Yahoo now.
And ATW's bots belong to Overture.
PS: I just can't resist making a little political observation: Yahoo! knows what they're doing. They're run by people who understand that a businessman's fundamental resonsibility is to ensure that gross income exceeds gross expenditures.
Google, on the other hand, is run by one Eric Schmidt, who believes that a businessman's fundamental responsiblity is to give blow jobs to Elton John, who in turn gives blow jobs to The Inventor of the Internet [TIOTI] himself.
Hint to investors the world over: If you see a once proud corporation with Eric Schmidt at the helm [Novell, anyone?], then short it.
And don't think for a second that the timing of this Yahoo!/Google announcement was a coincidence. There's no way in hell the boyz at Yahoo! were gonna let Schmidt get his grubby socialist paws on $4 Billion in IPO capital if they could do anything about it.
PPS: Overture had purchased both ATW and Altavista, so now Yahoo! owns Inktomi, ATW, and Altavista. Together the three of them might not equal Google's market share, but that's a lot of history, a lot of technology, and a lot of brainpower that Yahoo! has very quietly amassed.
PPPS: And it's all gonna run on FreeBSD! THE GPL SUX DONKEY DIX! LONG LIVE THE ANTI-LICENSE LICENSE!!
Way back when it used to take some skill and determination to wring a good answer out of a search engine. So those days are coming back. So what?
There has never been a reasonable request that I couldn't get a good answer for out of google, even in these days of scumbag result fuckeruppers.
BTW, how come nobody bitches about those guys. You all whine about spam, but search engine polluters go unharrassed. The latter are worse, imo.
Yahoo users were still unable to find the "search" button at Yahoo.com among advertisements, sweepstakes offers, pretty buttons, news headlines, shopping categories, and about a hundred other annoyances.
Now that Yahoo's decided to switch beyond, maybe it'll be time for Google to improve its database import spiders so we don't see spam in their db. You know what I'm talking about, erroneous results like http://electronic-store.tanks4all.com/ that comes up when you search for 'speaker review car'
All the spam domains I checked into last November came up registered by the same people, too:
Venera Pictures, LLC
Samantha Dayk (samdayk@msn.com)
+1.14107857078
FAX: +1.-
1170 S. Chelton Rd.
Colorado Springs, CO 80910
US
Gateway Traffic, LLC
Sean Der (seander@verizon.net)
+1.4107857078
FAX: +1.-
102 Hunts Bluff Road
Sparks, MD 21152
US
If they add a Bayesian algorithm on incoming pages (comparing link farm pages to ham, and determining it's spam), and keep track of the whois informatin for domains (all the spam domains I found using random search queries led back to those false names in the whois database), Google's results could probably stay non-erroneous for some time.
It's really a tragedy that advertisers feel they can skip paying Google, and instead wreck Google for users and other advertisers, causing people to move on the potentially greener pastures. We've had IM partially ruined by spam, email almost ruined, and places like Google ruined. When will laws be passed so that purposefully attacking online systems is as illegal and easily prosecutable as defacing buildings?
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
about a search engine who can't even spell their name correctly: google isn't googol
/.'s around here.
In fact take a look at Google-Watch. May enlighten some of the
Yahoo! plans to dump Google as its primary search technology
Erm, excuse me. Is there any other "search technology" that can only remotely compare to google quality and coverage?
To me the above phrase sounds like:
Yahoo! plans to render their search functionality useless.
Day #1 - Google announces IPO
Day #2 - Yahoo announces they dump google
You don't suppose this isn't a coincidence or that it has nothing to do with technology do you?
In a former life I swam with the sharks on Wall St. This reeks of "they're up to someting".
But no matter, if Yahoos replacement for google is any good it'll yield more or less the same search results as google.
Google may lose some ad revenue over this, which makes them worth a few gazillion less, maybe.
But people who rank highly in google shouldn't fear, if yahoos replacement is any good they should rank highly in that too.
All things considered, this strikes me as significant as a gnat hitting a 747.
Need Mercedes parts ?
That's very true. But there's a lot of them. And they're worth money.
But no matter, Yahoos replacement can hardly generate vastly different search results from google and expect to be useful no can it?
Need Mercedes parts ?
I already use yahoo mail, and I love MyYahoo. I would gladly wait a whole second or two, or even wait for email, to get a useful page of results that is biased to my categories. I don't give a flying fuck about what is most popular to the general web audience. Fundamentally, there is no such thing as "most relevant" because that it usually (maybe exclusively) context-dependent and person-dependent. On a Monday, my searches could be linux or programming related, so I want a customizable filter or checkbox that biases everything for that. But on Friday, I may want to find localized pizza joints, AND I want to find the most popular movies among everyone, not just linux geekdom.
All that should be one category or filter or personalized button away, because my preferences don't change that often, even though my search needs change every time. And I think that if everybody was using some personalization, it would become more difficult to build pages and link farms that would always rise to the top. Spamming would be harder because the optimizers would have to guess what personlization biases the vast majority of users would choose.
And even simple filtering and reranking should be easily possible in about a second. e.g. restrictions to selected categories in dmoz.com, or sites within a certain distance or weight of some human-edited directory, or that contain any synonym for some set of terms, and many others that are easy to think of. None of this stuff is rocket science or new or computationally expensive. But this sort of remembered customization would go a long way to saving me hours of search time every week. I'm disappointed that it hasn't happened, even since altavista days.
My guess is that google will eventually have to provide logins and accounts to allow personalization, because cookies may not be enough. Cookies don't stay in sync with my laptop or when I go to the library or my friends computer. Yahoo, MSN, and AOL will easily be able to do this stuff. I'd like Google to remember me also. In other words, Google may have to start looking even more like a general purpose portal.
Too late...Yahoo went public ages ago.
Ba-dum-dum-pshhhh!
Dateline - New York - April 24: Yahoo today announced it's re-cementng it's relationship with formed partner Google as replacement for it's failed effors to use frobozz as a search engine technology.
Keep in mind the nice men that are taking google public also took Yahoo public. Cough.
Need Mercedes parts ?
"google" as a verb is something people like to say. It's on TV. It's a fashions statement and says you're cool.
"Do you Yahoo! ?" is something people filter out.
(and it was, in response to an earlier post, Stanford, not Berkely. I think it was akebono.stanford.edu/~yahoo in its earliest incarnation.)
Need Mercedes parts ?
Some claim Alltheweb is better than google, but I find its about equal.
Some other experimental engines I've seen have alot of potential, especially the ones who come up with narrowing suggestions and do accurate self-categorization. Teoma is a good example of that.
-
I tried that search but the top link was actually pretty good - ePinions is not a bad site to end up when looking for electronics info, though not the best one.
I do agree with your last assment though, that Google should try and do a little something to stem the tide of poor results - some sort of default exclusions you could set up in a cookie might be interesting, though Goole is all about simplicity and that might make them a bit too hard to use.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You're right. I wrote this about 10 minutes after waking up so I am going to assert the "groggyhead" defense.
. SLASHDOT: Home of the vicious nerd.
Yahoo is not rocket science, and it sure ain't Google. And Yahoo probably (justifiably) doesn't want to pay Google prices for a feature that just doesn't matter that much to the great majority of their users. Because the great majority likely fall into two camps:
/., then fark, then memepool, etc.
1. Too dumb to use anything EXCEPT whatever search engine they're spoon-fed by Yahoo.
2. Too smart to ever use ANYTHING spoon-fed to them by Yahoo.
I'm a Yahoo user. But even when they switched their search engine to Google, I still tracked over to google.com for all my searching. Google has created a *tres chic* brand, and Yahoo can't appropriate that.
But on to my main point....
Have you people even been to yahoo.com in the past few years?! Suggesting that full-text web searching is somehow a critical Yahoo feature is just silly. Only the most technologically myopic of grandmas and carpenter uncles actually searches with Yahoo.
Yahoo excels at being a ==PORTAL==. My personalized Yahoo page is very convenient. CLICK->categorized personalized mainstream news, weather, basic calendaring, etc.->scan, scroll, scan, scroll->sip coffee->CLICK->on to
..more distressing scenarios.
/will/ know more about you than you do. Like I said, there be dragons.
We don't know what, when, and (to some extent) how "they" observe us - logging our behaviour, our interests, dreams, information. We don't know what "they" use it for, by themselves or with "partners", today or in the future. What knowledge is (or will be) combined with your profile and usage data, and so on and so on...
All this while "providing integrated, quality solutions and experiences". Or, without the adspeak: "Gaining access to more and more parts of your digitized self (to be used at our discretion)". Risque.
They
We don't want to find ourselves ordering those Bigmac&Co's, and be luvin' it - without a clue as to why that is - now, do we?
668.5
I'm sorry to sound confused but the search.yahoo.com looks like Google, feels like Google, but is really an Inktomi technology which Yahoo owns.
Kris
Kriston
Wrong --- Yahoo does not use Inktomi yet. All these announcements are about indicating that that might change.
I don't have a paid subscription to the wall street journal you insensitive clod
I remember when yahoo! was it's own search engine ;)
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
Yahoo mail is not excellent with the Swen virus.
There is no way to automaticly delete crap that
arrives in yor box, and when you are getting
hit by several hundred Swen e-mails an hour, which
fills up your quota (even when it's sent to the
trash), that box becomes useless. Oh, the trash
does automaticly delete after 30 days, but 30 days
might as well be an eternity when it comes to
this.
I have an excite box as well that appears to use
the same shitty e-mail system that Yahoo does.
I got one or two Swens, thought "oh no!", but
thankfuly, it didn't get the bombardment that
my Yahoo box did. I don't know if Excite filters
these before they arrive in my box, or if the
user who "sent" the Swen caught the problem and
fixed it immediately.
So they are hoping for a good Google IPO too.
In the short term Yahoo wins no matter what.
Refining searches using the "-" modifier is a good way to cut down on noise but Google imposes a limit of ten words.
Which is a pity because to weed out the guff in a lot of the searches I perform there are about four or five terms I routinely exclude meaning that what I can actually search for is limited (especially when I then find it necessary to refine and thus exclude more words).
It'd be nice if they offered to exclude lists of words according to type of search e.g. !commercial excludes "cheap"; "shopping basket"; "purchase"; "products" etc.
Sorry, but the business of Yahoo does not revolve around search as much as you think. Their numbers have been solid...actually incredible over the last year. They are also projecting 40% growth for the next couple of years. They are part-owner of the biggest web site in Asia - Yahoo Japan. They are also part owner of Google. Yes that is what I said. They have 2% stake. So they want a good IPO too. They will sell and it will show as gravy in the next quarter.
You will see AllTheWeb (FAST) show up as the engine on some Yahoo properties where it is better suited. Search at Yahoo will use Inktomi or AllTheWeb (FAST), Google is going away completely. You will not know when you are using FAST or Inktomi, it will not be advertised.
Wouldn't this be a smart move to make this "announcement" if yahoo wanted to invest in google's IPO?
Imagine this hypothetical scenario: Yahoo announces that they're dumping google as their search engine, just before google's IPO auction. People see this as bad news, and don't bid as much in the IPO. Yahoo can buy a lot more shares of google for less money. Yahoo then announces, "Oh, nevermind, we will use Google as our primary search engine still." Yahoo laughs all the way to the bank.
Maybe I'm just crazy. If I'm right, I'll have to start an investor's course or something.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
"The McDonalds people and I have a little misunderstanding. See, they're McDonalds, we're McDougals. We both offer two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce and cheese. But their buns have sesame seeds. These buns have no seeds."
more people I know use google.com, not google.yahoo.com
;P
but I dont blame them, I contacted google about spam links and they told me that the only people who can complain about links being removed ( I never mentioned removal) are the owners of the links themselves.
which contradicts itself, because why would spammers want to have their links removed?
getting tired of looking for something, seeing the same link (different domain) for the first 50 pages. usually having fake porn and hentai which you dont wanna see, and has nothing to do with what you're looking for.
I think someone needs to make an opensource, pro-active search engine that has better spam catching methods.
That's funny, because I found the article using google's news search. I would just like to point out that I used to use Yahoo! as a search engine back in the day. Then I found out about Google. A much better search engine without all the additional crap. Not to mention that one can easily set preferences to block that porn and adult content that is not wanted by the searcher. If Yahoo! no longer wants to use Google's technology then so be it, Google could possibly do just as well on their own anyway. Sure Yahoo looks nice and has other features like mail, greetings and personals, but Google is for searching, and if seaching is what you wanna do, then Google is the thing to use. Even I use Yahoo! for email and ecards and the like, but there is a lot of useless bandwidth being wasted on the Yahoo! site. Google is so simple and plain, as it should be.
Yahoo has a web search feature? Never knew that.
sic transit gloria mundi
I remember when it Wasn't, at all.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
Most of us don't have a subscription and will not subscribe just because of a slashdot link. Why post a story that most people will not read?
Anybody who says Google is useless doesn't use it
to search Usenet. This resource is by far the
most valuable archive on the planet for software
developers and anybody else who has a narrowly
focused need for information that is available on
Usenet.
I use it 40-50 times daily. Admittedly, I don't
use the Web search much, so I haven't witnessed
google's "demise", but I think it's still an
incredible tool. And I heap tons of praise on
google's management for not caving to the pressure
to crap up their site with graphical ads, lots of
self-promotional links, irrelevant information,
etc.
I despise Yahoo in general, but I love dogpile for my search engine which I just realized is owned by Yahoo--gahh!
http://www.kelseygroup.com/sum/tkradv0321.htm
heard on the grapevine...
The google Premium ads - the two that used to be at the top of the list, typically in bad pastels - are now publically up for grabs as an extension of the textads on the right side.
Those "premuim" ads used to be highly expensive and oft battled over, now theyre just the top two "bid per click" ads.
I just thought you kids would find that interesting.
s'wut i sed.
/shun *@NineNine
/mode #0x1337 -v NineNine
/kick NineNine #0x1337 "Pinehads with pr0n sigs don't get voice"
/mode #0x1337 +b NineNine
/kill NineNine
.... too bad, they made such a cute couple.
Yahoo has owned FAST (Alltheweb.com), Inktomi and Altavista for a while now, so it's been more than obvious for a full year that they would be dropping Google for their SERPS (search engine results pages).
Everyone at google knew this, even those with their hands on the money, and planning the IPO. The question is this, would losing Yahoo affect the revenue potential of Google's other ventures?
The flat answer is no.
Yahoo paid google a nice fee for using google technology, but it doesn't compare to the money google is making off of their advertising models. Yahoo does not show Google ads on their SERPS, so google isn't losing any pageviews of its advertisements. Google is losing nothing but a flat fee that it cares little about anymore.
Both adwords and adsense, Google's two main advertising and money producing ventures are completely independent of Yahoo and always have been. They will now be directly copied by Yahoo in an ugly attempt to start making money intelligently, many years late.
Sounds like a winning idea to me! I'm quitting Google and switching to Yahoo! After all, the Corporate Masters know what's best for us!
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
I stopped using Yahoo search around the time the X10 pop-ups started. Granted their model was pretty hot though.... Out of principle alone, I'll never use Yahoo again. I'd bet that's really what drove most users away. Who really cares what search engine they use? Most ppl use google anyway.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Of all the competitors out there, Yahoo poses the most direct threat to Google. my.yahoo.com was rated in the top 5 of Amazon's Alexis service.. And Google's search technology has become increasingly sucky due to spammers taking advantage of their algorithms to flood the search results with their crap.
This will be a good thing for everyone, methinks. The search engine war needs to get heated up a little bit as it has cooled down too much.
--
om Shanti
I've never found Yahoo that great a serach engine. When I use them, it's for the same thing they started out as - a hierarchical category of links.
For searches, I use altavista, alltheweb and google. While google has been declining, they're still not *that* bad.
Most of the time.
OK, sometimes.
With both Yahoo and Microsoft throughing huge sums of money into developing other search solutions, and the amount of sheer crap on google, doesn't seem like I can find the results I once could, the market is ripe for a new engine to come along.
I still remember the days of Altavista being king of the search world...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
This came out in network computing's december 9th issue. thing is... is it really a better algorythm?
...that they already switched.
:(
Whenever I do an identical search on Yahoo! and Google, they are vastly different. I am definitely seeing Inktomi results.
It's funny to me because I get paid to make our company show up in the search engines, and practically the same day we made our top rankings, I noticed Yahoo was displaying Inktomi.
Well, at least there's some competition now...
Hey.
0xfeedface
are you andrew myers?
0xfeedface
I always have to reword my searches, and I always get fake URLs comin up. I remember the good ole days where all I used was metacrawler. And it worked damn good.
All of ya'll who are scared this will affect Google's ipo - please stay that way so I can buy cheaper hence more. By the time you wake up, I'll be retiring...(I wish) - but at least I would have made a larger gain due to mass fright.
I've been tracking this for months now and it would appear they are slowing moving away from Google (very, very slowly).
This is good for users. There will be some serious competition between Inktomi+Overture=Yahoo and Google.
Now the only problem will be getting web sites indexed. Inktomi will crawl non-paying sites if an authority site or paying site links to a non-paying site. For example, I get hits from Inktomi's crawler (Slurp) almost everyday and I sure as hell didn't pay.
Two major search engines can't share space for very long, no matter how amiable it might seem. I was actually tired of both, myself. I have been frequenting Search Engine Watch for something more up-to-date (and less ad-sponsored). But then again, I guess I'm just doing that whole "underground rules" thing.
Huh? What's MapQuest powered by?
I believe that maps.yahoo.com is (or atleast used to be) powered by MapQuest.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.