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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...
"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.
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.