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."

Comments

The other shoe drops...

[LostCluster]

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.

Re:The other shoe drops...

[fruey]

Yes. Yahoo jumped in to get Google tech when it was running high, and probably got a good deal too, since Google wasn't so well known back in 2000. The original press release is here. Yahoo! at the time said

"Yahoo! is focused on meeting the needs of these individuals [daily web searchers] by providing them with high-quality, relevant search results"

It would seem that the relevance of Google results is declining, precisely because so many people are working 24 hours a day to get their site ranked higher, and Kelkoo in particular seems to have done very well at that. www.alltheweb.com looks a lot like Google but isn't suffering at the moment from database pollution. I've seen it mentioned before on Slashdot, I think we'll be seeing it again. However, the plot thickens - if you click the "About" link on the AllTheWeb homepage you'll see that "AlltheWeb is a business of Overture Services, Inc." Now we know that Yahoo! acquired Overture back on October 7, 2003 ... and so there's no need for them to keep paying Google I guess. Especially not with a company that has a similar looking site!

What Google said at the time of Yahoo! integration of Google results:

"This is a significant milestone for Google and a strong validation of our business strategy"

The warning bells are ringing, since Yahoo! leaving - having been the loudest validation of the original Google business model - is terrible news in my opinion. It is of note that the Wall Street Journal (and not cnet news or CNN online or ZDNet, etc) picked up on this. The IPO is starting to look less rosy. What I would like to know is whether in the Yahoo! boardroom there was a long debate about the timing of this decision, and indeed what kinds of money were changing hands with Google for provision of searches and whether the price was set to go up for 2004!

Might be time to rethink that IPO?

[Josh Mast]

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.

Re:Might be time to rethink that IPO?

[whovian]

When I want to look for a category or find out simply "What is X basically?" quickly, I use Yahoo over Google. For this, it is a waste of time weeding out the crap Google has been bubbling to the surface lately. It's like those porn web sites that all refer to one another without actually providing any content.

Now when I want specific examples or contexts, such as "Do related terms X and Y occur on the same web page or in the same usenet article?", Google is great. Still, the crap has to be picked out.

Rethink their IPO?

[gpinzone]

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.

Re:Rethink their IPO?

[Gary Whittles]

Not to mention that Google is basically being forced to IPO and doesn't have much of a choice in the matter.

Google has remained private as long as possible. If their VCs were looking to cash out, they could have done it before the crash. And everyone has been asking them to IPO for the last 2 years to kickstart the stock market. It was smart of them to wait until the DJ was above 10,000, but probably unnecessary.

The reason they are going public is because SEC rules force companies with a certain number of owners to go public. The companies have to file all the costly paperwork as if they were a public company, and they lose most of the advantages of staying private, such as not releasing all that information about their activities. There is little reason to stay private, and the extra cash from the IPO is handy for paying for all that paperwork.

The famous case of this happening was Microsoft. Too many employees were exchanging shares privately, and the SEC forced them to go public. They did really well, and you cannot blame their decline on being a public company since the prior management is still running things. OTOH, because MSFT is public, the shareholders can insist on new management, but they will probably wait until the stock goes under $10, and that will be too late to save the company, if it isn't already.

Yahoo bot?

[m00nun1t]

"...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?

More painful for Yahoo

[gcaseye6677]

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.

searches, personalization, and privacy

[tuxette]

Second, Yahoo wants to combine personalization and customization features to extend the usefulness of searches.

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.

Impact on Google revenues & profits

[G4from128k]

"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.

Yes, Google is overrated

[nnnneedles]

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..

Re:Why?

[sql*kitten]

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.