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Yahoo Fights Back in Battle With Google
ChipGuy writes "Om Malik has a great analysis of how Yahoo is fighting back the Google assault. 'A handful of blog-evangelists, a couple of key buys - (Odd Post and Flickr) have turned Yahoo from a dot.has.been to the new darling of the chattering classes.' Yahoo's new initiatives like Yahoo 360 are even apprently making Yahoo Web 2.0 compliant."
yahoo has a long history of buying interesting companies to let them rot on their site. they incorporate them but don't extend the features past what they were initially. even worse when they get an interesting new feature they don't take anything interesting from that new project and incorporate it site wide, which for example they could do with flickr.
the only real exception to this has been their email system, which i'm no longer that flattered with...
sure it's great they have all sorts of neat features but who cares when they don't bother to update them as time goes by and users tastes change? google seems to actually do interesting things with their new projects. i am very curious how these new purchases are going to work out for yahoo or if they are just going to add to the rot.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Yahoo's got a good chance if they continue promoting services that can't be solved just by throwing a bunch of computers at them (no offence to Google intended).
In my case, I teach English in Korea. There's a great webpage that has an English/Korean dictionary with phrases of the day, sound files for pronunciation, and a bunch of sample sentence translations for the common words in the dictionary. It's even smart enough to know whether or not Korean or English was the original language and spits out the opposite language accordingly. Granted, that type of feature is probably easy to replicate, but it's still smart thinking, and shows that they're working on services that make things easy for users.
That's not something that Google can offer, even with its translation services, which can be notoriously buggy for going back and forth between Western and Eastern languages anyway.
Now, THAT said, nothing Yahoo's got right now is going to keep me away from google.com for searches. But they still have a decent portal service that integrates with email, along with yahoo groups and games, they probably don't have to worry TOO much yet.
Yahoo seems to do a much better job indexing small websites and user pages than google. Google usually has a harder time finding sites that are not linked to often and can lead to trouble when you are looking for that obscure piece of information.
In a Google vs Yahoo war, the real loser is:
(mini-dumrol)(dum-da!)
Microsoft search.
Seems to me that Google and Yahoo are going to slug it out... Yahoo with their angle of providing numerious services, news, and such.. Being a general modern version of the 'Web portal', and Google leveraging experimental and search technics.
Bunches of features vs small amount of advanced features.
Were does Microsoft fit in? A small amount of non-advanced features?
You have 34% for Google, 31% for Yahoo, and 15% for Microsoft search. I wonder how they will fair within the next couple year.
The year 2005 could be another watershead year in search technology. If the new MSN-search can't make inroads within the next few months.. I don't see it happenning.. period.
Hold on here. Google is the upstart. Yahoo is the old man of the internet, the darling of the dot-com boom that survived the crash. Yahoo had all of these before Google existed or became important:
Web directory.
Web search.
Free web-based email.
Online organiser (calender and address book).
Free web hosting.
Online photo sharing.
News headlines and stories.
Movie times.
Maps.
Weather.
You can argue that Google has done nothing new. Their flagship product is nothing more than a better mousetrap - way to find stuff on the internet that's better than what came before. Yahoo was doing that a very, very long time ago - but mostly in the "digital directory" sense (creators of pages submit their page into the appropriate categories), not like Google's focused "digital index of everything" approach.
Put it this way: Could you still effectively use the internet if you could only access one company's web pages?
If I could only access *.yahoo.com I could basicly still do everything that I do on the internet. Check mail, read news (that's actually hosted on Yahoo's site), play online games, organise via online callender, watch music videos, participate in discussion groups. I could even look at porn - some discussion groups, refreshingly, have adult content. Yay for Yahoo treating users like grown-ups and allowing users to host porn on their networks!
If I could only access *.google.com - I'd be less pleased. Check mail, read news headlines (content is hosted elsewhere), read and post to internet newsgroups. But no porn unless it's ASCII because Google newsgroups ignore binary attachments. Dammit.
So anyway, my point is that Yahoo has more features and more stuff than Google. Google is slicker in some areas (like the clown-colored email client and the gee-wiz map javascript scrolling), but Yahoo is broader, more integrated and streamlined (try printing a Google map - it's messy). If you look at overall features - Yahoo kicks Google's ass. Yahoo's been bigger and badder than Google for a very long time. They're probably the most experienced company still on the internet when it comes to providing personalised content. And I've a feeling that Yahoo 360 is about to completely own Blogger.
You know, I've always kinda thought of Yahoo as another relict - something you look back to in nostalgia but don't really use any more.
To add some background: I registered my Yahoo account in or around '98. Back then, it was still the "Big Y!" and I, like most people, had set the MyYahoo site as my homepage (with all the news, stock market stuff, local weather and TV listings neatly organized in one place). And since everybody used Altavista and/or Yahoo as their search engine, using Yahoo as a portal seemed just natural.
Fast forward two years: Google is the new hotness. I still have my Yahoo account but don't use it anymore. Truth be told, I only kept it because of a few random Yahoo groups mailing lists. And since I had the emails forwarded to my POP3 (and later IMAP) server, there was really no need for me to ever log on to Yahoo again.
Fast forward again - the year is 2005. I haven't used Yahoo since 2001 or so. I have Google set as my homepage. Despite generally and genuinely not liking webmail services, I almost exclusively use Gmail. I also use a web-based RSS aggregator (first a quick 'n' dirty PHP hack I put together one night, and now mostly Bloglines).
Now for the first time in 4 years, I actually logged into my old Yahoo account. To tell you the truth, I was a little surprised the account still worked. The email account had been deactivated (thank God for sparing me from almost half a decade old spam). Everything else still worked, and looked a lot sleaker than it used to.
Then I tried their Calendar and, much to my surprise, had no problem syncing it with my PDA. True - it doesn't measure up with Act! 2005, but I didn't really expect a free web-based calendar app to outperform a dedicated, $200 or so software solution.
Anyway, I have to say I'm somewhat impressed. Their interface is still a little bulky but it actually does what I want it to do.
Personally, I believe many average users will see the benefits of open standards because of competition from sites like Yahoo. If I find a superior RSS solution, I can just take my OPML file and switch without any effort whatsoever. Don't like your webmail provider? Just take your mbox file and move it to the webmail service you like (granted, you still have to jump through a few hoops to do this).
Competition really is a good thing, in my book. The important thing is that even if Yahoo doesn't outperform Google in the end, it's still the user who benefits.