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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!
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.