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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."
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.
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?
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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.
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.
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...)
"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.
Not exactly. The search engine user just has to be a little more search engine savvy. For instance, if you are looking for information about the 'place' Bermuda, but want to avoid all the advertisments, put "Bermuda -hotel" into google. Shows up with airline ticket ads? Then change it to "Bermuda -hotel -airfare". Basically you can strip down your searches, get through all the chaff and find what you are looking for.
TK
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
A lot of commercial sites can be cut out by adding "site:org" to the search. For a lot of things that will get you the no-nonsense facts you used to get in the old days. Unfortunately it's a matter of time until all the sleazy huckster sites add a .org alias, and it's already happening. But for right now it kind of
works - take advantage while it lasts.
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).
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.
Yahoo! could have created an "About" search - a flag that looks for sites indexed as research, not retail sites. Sites that inform, not sell. That would have been a way to differentiate, not throw in the towel.
I disagree that it is Marketing 101 to throw in the towel when you see your competition has a better product. To me, Marketing is about differentiation.
There are core features a product must have to be considered (like a car must be street legal), and the rest is what differentiates the product (like the size of the seets or the HP of the engine).
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
True, marketing is partly about differentiation. It's also about core competencies. This includes knowing when you've been beaten.
Insert offensive troll-style sig here. Please mod or respond appropriately.
Google makes great search appliances for networks.
Yes and no. Google's great strength is that it looks for links to a document as an indication of the quality of the document. In other words, it leverages evaluations of a document collectively made by humans. That works (or at least, worked) fabulously well for a most hand-written Internet, or in a case where someone familiar with the knowledge domain had written automated software to cross reference specific sections of it.
But what if there's nothing for PageRank to go on? What if you have 100,000 pre-Web documents in SGML/RTF/Word/FrameMaker, without any hyperlinking at all? Well, then all Google has to go on is keywords... it's "edge" evaporates.
Google's business is a commodity - what they have right now is a great brand and a solid (but not particularly spectacular) technology. When they have a technology that can do what Google Answers does, then it'll be safe for them to IPO, but not before.
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.
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?
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.