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What Can Yahoo Do To Compete with Google?
ryanjensen writes "Jay Currie over at Tech Central Station has an article up about Yahoo's pending entrance into the AdSense advertising market, and outlines some things Yahoo (and MSN for that matter) can do to compete, including: Paypal payouts, revenue share transparency, rewarding quality (but small) publishers, and offering an alternative to "keyword bids" for advertisers." It should be noted that Yahoo has already been fighting Google on this front - Overture, owned by Yahoo!, has been running an Ad-Sense like program for a while.
Don't compete with Google! I've been a long term fan of Yahoo because it's the Jack of all trades, even if it is the master of none. One Yahoo account comes with a lot of features!
Yahoo could let you put per-page targetted phrases on the page. So in the advert code you could put "Chocolate Confectionary;Wooden Clackers;Pink Pajamas" and if Yahoo hasn't analysed the page yet it serves up an add for Chocolate Confectionary, Wooden Clackers or Pink Pajamas....
There are lots of sites that generate pages on the fly, but Google can't serve up an ad until its parsed the page, so the first showing of that page (the most important) shows no adverts.
Same with general news site, context analysis is terrible for general news, it would be better to let the new site specify the keyphrases on a per-page basis.
Seriously though, has anyone read their privacy page? It's worse than AOL's AIM TOS.
To quote a few of their policies:
Yahoo! automatically receives and records information on our server logs from your browser, including your IP address, Yahoo! cookie information, and the page you request./b>
... exactly the same as apache does by default, except the cookies - oh boy...
Yahoo! uses information for the following general purposes: to customize the advertising and content you see, fulfill your requests for products and services, improve our services, contact you, conduct research, and provide anonymous reporting for internal and external clients. aka "Sell your habits as an anonymous client to advertisers
So far no real privacy issues here; they are merely analysing the behaviour of anonymous clients, and/or target advertisements based on behaviour of clients; for example, never show an advertisement more than 5 times to each user (cookies) or try to find out how often certain links are clicked from certain pages inside their site...
... still pretty normal website administration here.
These companies may use your personal information to help Yahoo! communicate with you about offers from Yahoo! and our marketing partners.
Ah, and here you do have a little point; this is probably based on your personal account information. Most likely this allows them to target for example German advertisers to German visitors...
And please, don't say I don't have any solid proof that they are not doing this; there is just as little proof that says they do do bad stuff with your privacy...
I'm merely illustrating here that this shouldn't mean all terror and shouldn't be a sole reason to stay away from Yahoo!.
- Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com
You probably ought to have a few more thoughts about the google cookie, and what they are tracking (hint; the same information)...
Isn't the real question "What can Google do to become more like Yahoo?"
Obviously, no user of Google wants that to happen. But now that Google is a public company, you can expect them to wring every last drop of shareholder value out of their various and many properties:
local.google.com
maps.google.com
images.google.com
scholar.google.com
answers.google.com
catalogs.google.com
www.froogle.com
www.keyhole.com
etc, etc, etc.
In other words, expect the Google start page at some point in the future to look even more cluttered than Yahoo's.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I rarely go to Yahoo! home page, but they do have "My Yahoo!", and really, nobody has a competing product as that!
Allow people to bid on ads based on the site's placement in the Yahoo directory.
Sometimes Adwords ads get thrown off by content on a particular page. I was running a personal blog running google ads as more of an experiment than anything (I got like 100 hits a week, nothing huge). Once I posted that I had purchased my first home, all of the Google ads turning into cheesy mortgage broker ads, even though none of the other stories had anything to do with mortgages.
Weighting website category classification & keywords would yield better results.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Yahoo is the most organized "portal" on the net.
If your doing research it is much easier to find what you are looking for on yahoo than anywhere else.
Need a new car? Yahoo Autos, Need a new Job? Yahoo HotJobs, need to do some research? Education.yahoo.com
Want to follow business, stocks, rss feeds, news, local weather, auctions, bank accounts, investments? My.yahoo.com.
Want raw search? http://search.yahoo.com
I'm not sure you even know what easy to use and customer friendly means. I can contact Yahoo help on yahoo messenger to find out about a yahoo auction, i can lookup my buddies, do an address lookup and follow everything through in Yahoo without having to "google for it". Infact Yahoo is so easy, so quick that its funny to see Google trying to catchup. Google can only add so much more before it looks worse or exactly like yahoo.
Even http://search.yahoo.com feels messy to me compared to Google. If I'm trying to search, I don't care about news. Or my email. So please don't get me two big boxes containing both. Admittedly, you can click the "X" to make those two boxes go away... But even when I enter a search term and click "Search", the list of results is much more bloated in Yahoo than in Google, imo. - Yolego
Google is probably more invasive than Yahoo! And certainly more sophisticated about violating your privacy. Once Gmail accounts become common, they will become a spammer to be reckoned with.
The sad fact is that I just want a search engine. I don't want "directed marketing" spyware or behavior tracking.
Google is replaceable. If they were gone tomorrow, I'd just use something else. That fact makes me very wary of Google's stock valuation.
This poster hits it on the head. Everyone I know cannot stand "portals" like Yahoo! just because of all the home page clutter, ads, and crap that is displayed both on the main page and on the subsequent results.
Honestly, I'm surprised that after Google's success, other engines didn't catch on...
Because in the end it's not about being nice and make your pages pretty, but about earning money...
Last time I heard, Yahoo! was still doing a pretty good job in that area, so I don't think they really worry about the ad-loaded pages...
- Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com