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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."
Providing Linux support will help! For example, Google should make Picasa for Linux! They can use autopackage to make it easier for installations.
It's profound just how much money these companies will spend to give things away for free.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
From TFA: "It is no surprise that many Yahoo insiders felt like the Yankee fans - no matter what they did, they were going to be overshadowed by Google."
/.
Does this analogy make sense to anyone? Are these the same Yankee fans that support the richest, most successful team in baseball history? (And I say that as a Red Sox fan.) Perhaps Mets fans would have been a better comparison -- or maybe there's another breed of "Yankee fans" out there that I'm missing entirely.
Sorry for the sports chat on
"turned Yahoo from a dot.has.been to the new darling of the chattering classes"
Im sorry but you can not really call Yahoo a has been , it may not be the #1 anymore , and i wouldnt use it as its pages are too busy , but a has been ?
The site has a massive turnover , and it still one of the most popular sites for many reasons , Mail , messenger , Geocities and searching etc.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
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
I was over on Google-owned Blogger.com the other day and reading a few of the blogs they've got listed there. It dawned on me as I read those blogs that what we are seeing here in the blogging format is a new form of media being created.
You're the first person EVER to have had that insight. Amazing! What will you do for your next trick?
I think Yahoo needs to stop counter-attacking and start inovating. Adding more widgets to their site and imitating Google's 1GB mailbox isn't winning anyone over who has the same on the other side. If they want to fight giants like Google, they need to take some risks of their own.
-----
Check out the Uncyclopedia.org :
The only wiki source for politically incorrect non-information about things like Kitten Huffing and Pong! the Movie !
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
On a semi-related note, if you haven't checked out MSN Spaces yet it's well worth the look. There's a lot of cool stuff being done in there, like integration with MSN Messenger so you can instantly see when your friends have updated their blog/pictures space-thingy (for the inevitable replies about news aggregators, just think of this as an alternative with a different feature set).
No, but I used to work for Microsoft.
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.
That's besides the point. Anyone who wants to use WordPress or whatever on Yahoo already can - MySQL, PHP, Perl, whatever. I have web hosting up the whazoo - and I'm still looking forward to trying Yahoo's blogging when it's released. The beauty is going to be the rich integration of blogs into all the other services that they offer - and the scope of the virtual communities that they're trying to build.
Previous virtual communities were based around topics that people had in common - look at LiveJournal. But if you read their press releases and look at the clipart - what Yahoo seem to be doing here is starting at a much more personal scale. It's trying to get you, your mom and your real-life friends all reading and sharing blogs.
And the greatness of something like WordPress doesn't matter if it's a completely standalone system (which is hard to use, nobody has a log in, etc, etc). I think they'll do for Blogs what Geocities did for personal websites - take them mainstream and make them more popular than ever before. The blog is to 2005 what the personal homepage was to 1995.
Sure - the quality of most of them is going to suck, the "long tail" majority will never attract any real traffic, but only friends of the people that made them will be reading, so it should be worthwhile for all involved.
This article was a waste of 2 minutes. It meandered about a central issue with plenty of buzz-words and enough links to give a Wikipedian a head-ache. It can be summed up to this:
Yahoo has been unpopular among bloggers despite being a solid business. It has been playing catch-up lately with features and very recently has begun to surpass google with the features provided. It's actions haven't been about business, but about popularity among bloggers. As such it has become much more popular among bloggers. Oh, and the new areas Google has been branching into suck. So does it's search ability.
I don't know about other people here, but a blogger saying that company X is more popular among bloggers because of it's recent changes isn't something "that matters" to me.
Then again, I'm not too keen on the blogging community.
It completely lost me when I came up to:
The blog-evangelists unlike press relations folks, only write when there is something important to say. That is if they want to maintain their credibility.
Sorry, but blog evangelists have no credibility among those who like to use their brain when viewing news.
This article does get extra kudo points for irony (displaying google ads on a pro-Yahoo, anti-Google article).
Google is getting google-bombed .
They are both ok.
But I would like an alternative.
That's... some pretty complicated plans.
I wonder if it ever occurred to them to just make a better website?
...
Nah, probably not.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
With all of their clout, sheer presence, and complete dominance over the Internet, these power players don't need to get into a pissing contest.
Now, this is a pissing contest.
These companies can battle until their blue in the face. It really doesn't matter, they're just taking turns one-upping each other in the most insignificant ways possible. It would be like pepsi and coke battling each other by making their bottles larger, 1/100000th of an ounce at a time. Sorry if this angers anyone, but even Google's great search technology has become dated. It's the "IE won the battle" syndrome. Since no one else has closed in on their domination, they haven't really bothered fine-tuning, or completely refactoring, their search algorithms since days long ago. Although Yahoo gave up on trying to offer a good search years before Google even got started. All I'm saying is that I wish they'd start competing by offering truly significant innovations. "It's like normal e-mail, but with more space!" isn't really innovative (beyond the initial "Wow!" factor). Try something like a 100% standards compliant web browser with native in SVG support, and an XML parser. I'm the first to say that Google is ahead of the game, but the problem is the game is penny-ante.
Whilst i agree your point is valid , You ruin it with a Fake Sig
By almost every financial metric Yahoo! is actually doing better than Google. I wish I could be that kind of "has been."
That said, Google does what it does better.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
...how wonderful Yahoo thinks it is? I'm not inclined to think they're "wonderful". I don't care about their image.
It isn't "wonderful" that yahoogroups, in changing their layout, have now made it difficult and frustrating to search message archives. Not exactly Internet 2.0 company style, is it. If they want "wonderful", give me "useful".
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
While Yahoo! have been pretty nimble recently, especially with the improved search , aquiring flickr, yahoo! API , firefox toolbar , their email service has to go a looong way before they can tempt new users. Some of the things that would make me use more of my existing Yahoo id, * So, you have increased the email space to 1GB. But whats killer about that ?. * Integrate y! mail, y! chat and 360 (whenever that's ready) so that i can search my emails, chats, my blogs ,external blogs i've syndicated in my yahoo! . ( Think of Gnome's Dashboard project here.)
* Integrate Flickr! into my Yahoo! mail search. For example, when I search for bangpypers , i should also get to see the photos of bangpypers meetups, stored in my flickr account or my contact's accounts. Its the RSS people...
* I'm very keen about seeing the chat session being saved as 'conversations' in my yahoo mailbox and being able read/search. No, saving sessions on to the disk some how does not work out.
* Remove all the ads, make the interface really lightweight
* put POP access back; that was the reason I started using Yahoo! in the first place
* Add intelligent search to email ala gmail . This should be trivial to yahoo
After a long time, I'm rooting for Yahoo!. Perhaps, I look to yahoo! as being a competetive underdog.
Meanwhile, google is playing catch up in some areas and seems to be running into problems (302 page hijacking)
http://btbytes.com - bytes of Bangalore, Technology and open source
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.
I've actually started using Yahoo's search again, something I never thought I'd do. The reason? Google's sandbox.
Many new sites are indexed by Google straight away, but don't appear in search results for up to 6 months. It seems to be an attempt by Google to counter spam sites, but it's catching a lot of legitimate sites as well. When I search I like to know that I'm getting up to date results, not just from sites that have been around for more than a few months,
It's not FREE (as in beer) !
Compare withg the biggest French ISP where you get what I describe for free...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I think yahoo will always be playing catch up in regards to search because google changed the basic assumptions of search with their PageRank algorithm. So much is driven by PageRank in regards to advertising revenue, that yahoo and msn.com must tailor their search results according to google's terms.
The other services that yahoo provides are really in different markets and not in direct competition with google. For example, hosting and DSL services with SBC isn't a competitor in the search market. One could conclude that because yahoo concentrates on so many things other then search, it may not be as dedicated to tuning its search algorithm.
Add the fact that yahoo's focus is to sell its search results, even if it means placing irrelevant results at the top of the page, only works in google's "do no evil" favor.
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.
Yahoo is now managed by the marketing and business people; Google continues to be run by the engineers.
Yahoo seems to be overfocusing on 'monetizing' every part of their portal (eg, IMvironments, annoying interrupting ads in Yahoo groups, etc etc) compared to Google which focuses on technical innovation first, capitalization later through quality (Adwords) rather than intentional forcing of it.
Until this fundamental management difference is overcome, Yahoo's corporate culture will be counter productive to competing with Google directly.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
Most of what comes out of the mouths of educated professionals is either incorrect, biased, boring or all three. Taking it "down a level" to the average Joe seems torturous.
Podcasting sounded interesting so I downloaded one that was acclaimed as "one of the few worth downloading!" on some site. It was just a college kid who rambles on for literally an hour every (day? week?) about what he's doing (like, "I ate dinner with Mike last night."), its like who gives a shit? Surely this isn't what Blogging is all about? 99% of it can't just be people typing "I took a dump yesterday, and it was a floater. Um. I like sausage pizza. Um.". What am I missing?
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
I think a lot of people don't realize the immense difference between Yahoo and Google. And sure Yahoo may be a little upset about how little press it gets, but it's really not in an all out brawl with Google. Sure they're competing in the search engine field, but Yahoo's a complete media portal where Google's all about the technology. That should really be recognized.
the toothpaste is frozen
I'm just waiting for someone to snatch up www.i2hub.com, www.connectu.com, www.stallscribbles.com, and www.jungalu.com. They're all run by the same company, and they target the college market. All the sites are popular with students (different segments). ConnectU has one of the best social networking technologies. i2hub, one of the most popular desktop tools for college students just recently released i2hub 2.0, which ties in ConnectU directly. Pretty cool stuff these guys are releasing. Their founder is featured in Current Magazine as the technology leader for his generation.
I don't relate to personal blogs, either. But I see who does. There are freshman and sophmores at my Univ. who were blogging in highschool, and now that everyone has gone different directions to school, its the *main* way they keep in contact. Consider your life as that of a Soap Opera star, but you have to write the script. It ain't none of it true *until* you've blogged it, then its what just what you've blogged that's *true*.
Having advertised consulting services on both Overture and Google, I can say that while Overture ads cost more per click, they deliver more value per dollar. I don't know if this is because I'm selling somthing business related and overture is better for that, or if it's because of somthing else.
My 2c.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
- Their front web page is less cluttered than my dorm room.
- Their products aren't full of annoyingly intrusive ads.
- Their search results are as good as Google's.
- They offer anything truly unique on the Web.
- They make me feel like I'm using a useful tool, rather than like I'm part of some kind of e-commerce experiment.
mail. It is a hold over from when I was younger. I only got the account because MS terminated my hotmail account( thankgod looking back). I suppose I am only with Yahoo still because they work well, spam is small and it takes 2 clicks to get my mail. I have even bought things offered by Yahoo. They must of had $80 off me.
Whats Google got off me even though I use their search engine all the time? A couple of ad clicks? I even have a gmail account but hardly use it at the moment. The
I recently registered for a Flickr account and use it. I might even upgrade after the beta. More money for Yahoo.
Google on the other hand have had very little off me yet I prefer their search and mail. Apart from the fact it picks up keywords. Yahoo's only annoying feature is that it forces me to sign in every day now to get my mail. I think every 24 hours it forgets you.
Why am I telling you this? I suppose its because I use to be a computer geek who was going down the path of linux and learning computer courses. But Yahoo isn't a geek site, google is. Yahoo have got my money, but I still favour Google because of its clean and simple design.
Jonathanjk.com
Hailing "blogging" is effectively like hailing paper - it's just a way to get your word out. Independent writers and publishers, like John Gruber (http://daringfireball.net/) and Joel Spolsky (http://joelonsoftware.com/) as well as the personal thoughts from people that are inside different industries - like Om - are what you like, the gems of which you speak. Sure - "blogging" as a media sure has its upsides, and I'm not sure we would have seen these writers without the rise of it. But hailing "blogging" - as some people here do - is no more correct than saying that all comments on Slashdot ought to be rated 5, Insightful. The opposite - degrading something for being based on the "blogging" format just because kids use it, too - is in essence no different than degrading the New York Times because the New York Times publishes on paper, and kids draw stupid stuff on paper. I hope we'll finally get away from all the hype on the particular media.
I hear you. Someone else in this thread mentioned LiveJournal, so I found the site and clicked on their latest posts link to have a look. OMFG. I have never seen such mind-numbing drivel in all my life. These people really, truly think that someone else on this planet cares when they got up in the morning, or just exactly how drunk they got last night, or what incredibly cute thing their cat just did, or even (Cthulhu help us) their "poetry". Un-be-fucking-lievable. For the good of the species, I just hope that they succumb to alcohol poisoning before they figure out how to reproduce...
Then again, we're yet to see the sort of buzz around these APIs that Google was able to muster. Where are the Yahoo equivalents of GoogleBrowser, Googlism and GoogleAlert? Guess there's still something more emotionally exciting about Google, at least for now...
Like I've stated before, I work at Best Buy's Geek Squad service. No need to reiterate. When I'm "off duty", I do free-lance computer repair for people, referenced-based only. I was recently at a lady's house in the middle of Bumblefuck, and she's having me install her computer (it was relocated for insurance reasons after a fire and she'd just got it back) back into it's spot. Had to reinstall Windows, she had ME... so I did her a favour and gave her XP Home. Anyways... the only 3rd-party software that I'd installed on her computer AT ALL was the Yahoo! SBC dial-up deal so she could just get online. That's all she wanted. Nothing else, just online capabilities. It turns out that the disc that Yahoo! sends you comes bundled with some "Easter Eggs" (quite convenient given the time of year) like MSBlast and some trojan with the process HWclock.exe (interminible). I ruled out the possibility that it were some OTHER software that gave her the virus, simply because the second after the XP tour deal ends (she was enthused to watch that mega-boring thing), I installed the Yahoo! SBC crap. Nothing else, just Windows and Yahoo! on that lonely hard disk, and she's already got a pair of viruses. Plus a few other things that I'm yet to get at becuase they disable access to regedit and task manager.
Yahoo! has nothing to be proud of really, and they should really check themselves before they get themselves into trouble for something like this. The lady I was servicing the computer of was almost going to publically boycott Yahoo! for it.
But in relation with the Google battle, I think they're just trying to cover the ground that Google's gaining on Yahoo!. Remember that Google is now a massive corperation who fires bloggers and gives "exclusive" memberships to their email services, and Yahoo! is so big they can only afford 2mb per box.
This whole thing was probably off topic...
They do have pop access, but you have to pay for it.
I use Yahoo mail to download my email from two external accounts and read it online (neither account has shell access). This is a feature Gmail DOESNT have. Then I can POP the mail from yahoo to my local machine. Its all part of Yahoo Mail Plus
I don't think Yahoo! has ever been a dot.has.been. Yahoo! is such a large company that they are perceived as a somewhat faceless corporate behemoth (at least among techies). Google, on the other hand is perceived as a more nimble, dynamic and adaptable company. Google is, of course, much smaller than Yahoo!, but still quite a large company (1900+ employees).
For techie folks who follow the Yahoo! bloggers, that "faceless" perception of Yahoo! is changing I think. Ironically, Google is beginning to appear a bit like a faceless corporation in the way they present themselves on the Web. Anyone who reads Google's official blog can't fail to notice how phoney and vapid it sometimes seems. As if each entry that's been posted has been run through a "press-release" language filter (I wonder if every entry is vetted before being posted). The other aspect is their secrecy - this is understandable to an extent. For me, the problem lies with their purchase of Blogger - I wish they would give some hint of what they plan to do with the service. Nothing has been announced or information given on the direction of the service - meanwhile, other companies like Six Apart are forging ahead with new features and growing mindshare. Now, Yahoo! is jumping into the fray with their imminent launch of Yahoo! 360.
I really dislike the new re-design of Google groups. I'm sure they must have done some user-testing on this, but it just seems like a leap backwards in many respects from their previous design.
Finally, I'm sure that Google remains the default search for many people, but I have noticed that other search engines like Alltheweb and Yahoo! Search often give comparable results. I don't think one can say (with as much certainty as in the past) that Google always provides the best search results. As an example, compare a search for the terms Open Source Usability on Google, Yahoo! and AlltheWeb. Not much to choose between them.
Because I don't want the whole GNOME libs to run a single specific application?
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
It requires GTK+ 1.x; I blame RedHat or Debian for installing GNOME when all you want is GTK. Requirements for Yahoo Messeger Unix:
http://messenger.yahoo.com/unix.php
X Window
GTK+ 1.2 or greater
OpenSSL 0.9.6 or greater
gdk-pixbuf 0.8 or greater
None of this require GNOME, only in the minds of the distro packagers.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
".com Pundits" like Om Malik still startle me with how they manage to think they are relevant. I have to wonder if submissions like this are PR agents for Om. He writes some pithy obvious sort of column every few months and gets a few hyperlinks for it, yet to read his bio it sounds like he is a god of the
Lots of those people don't expect you to care about when they got up in the morning. Instead, they expect their *friends* to be interested in such posts.
Some people use blogs as a convenient way of broadcasting things. I might have say, 10 people available on my favourite IM service, and not want to have an identical conversation about what I did today with each of them. Especially because maybe 4 of them don't care today about what my cat does. Instead, I just post it in the blog. Then they once in a while check their LJ friends page, skim the posts and read anything they like.
Now, there are indeed people who use blogs as an attempt to try to be a journalist, but there are also lots of them that use a blogs as a pretty and convenient mailing list.
See, the thing here is that a blog is simply yet another system with its advantages and inconveniences. If I want to have a group talk, I use IRC. If I want to ask a question right now I use IM. If I want to leave a message or to slowly discuss something in private, I use email. And when I want to broadcast stuff like "I'm feeling ill, so I'll go lie on the bed and read a book" then I post on the blog. You might not be in the slightest interested in that, but it's not for you.
I'm sure the OP meant revenue when he said turnover.
We Americans use "turnover" to refer to emplyee churn.
Just one of those terms that was confusing when I moved to London for a while...
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
It always seems like google engineers its own programs, while yahoo has to buy it from other companies... and it never turns out to work quite as well as google's webware...
Now why do you think that Blogging is the new media?
I think you'll find the same thing in a newspaper on the editorial page.
I would like someone to prove me wrong, but most blogs are just copies of what people agree with or are limited in their world view.
If blogs were truly a new media they would be more comprehensive rather then a collection of links to other clone blogs (clogs).
Take a look at the link to my JE in my SIG. Last week I complained about Wired magazine jumping on this retarded new trend. Why all the Google bashing all of the sudden? It's certainly not coming from people who actually know anything about how to design decent free web services that mean anything. Yahoo has had nothing but a useless search engine, crappy web mail and a useless bunch of junk on their portal for as long as I can see. Google, on the other hand has begun offering much better services and they do it by spending less money and having a smaller staff than Yahoo. They make extensive use of mostly standards compliant protocols/web design tools. And they use a Linux cluster to do it all. How much better can you get than that? In my view, all Yahoo had during their boom was a bunch of venture capital that they squandered foolishly. All they are trying to do right now is get more venture capital. Witness the STUPID notion that by upping their Yahoo mail quota to 1 gig, that they somehow compete with GMail. Bzzt! Wrong. They don't "get it". It's not the storage space stupid. It's the archiving, mail search and threading features that make GMail a cut above the rest. GMail almost makes mail as quick and easy as IM, but with the permanence of e-mail. Yahoo messenger blows chunks. Yahoo search engine is completely useless unless you're in the first grade and can't do a proper search. Sorry... Yahoo is nothing but a bunch of losers who focus more on money than technology. Technology is what this is all about, leave the money grubbing to the suits.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I think they'll do for Blogs what Geocities did for personal websites...
You mean they'll litter the internet with horrible blogs and the ones that are slightly decent will always be down due to bandwidth restrictions?
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
But if you read their press releases and look at the clipart - what Yahoo seem to be doing here is starting at a much more personal scale. It's trying to get you, your mom and your real-life friends all reading and sharing blogs.
I don't want my mom reading my blog. She'll be disturbed by all the porn-related posts.
I have blog like everyone else
Yahoo already offers it, but not for free. Now, if Yahoo Geocities (free) offered PHP and mySQL, and didn't adopt that agressive ad policy that Lycos UK had, they'd win some brownie points.
Why should I even worry about Yahoo offering any of this? I already have webhosting and a domain name with thePlanet connectivity. Lycos UK and Geocities sucked when I was stuck with them.
Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
Can someone tell me what "Web 2.0 compliant". Whatever it is "Web 2.0" sounds really big, and I want to know the details. I googled for the phrase and found nothing (google musn't have indexed the slashdot index recently). The term compliant leads me to believe there's an RFC or something out there I can look through. Does anyone have links to any info?
I have yet to figure out what mapquest/yahoo thinks US Route 1 (a major transportation route in my part of the country) is called.
From my experience with Mapquest in NJ, it will almost always use numbers (and only numbers) when they exist. This includes US, State, and County roads.
It's a little frustrating because county designations are rarely used by people in most areas. Luckily, they are required to be on the signs. There are also some state designations that have fallen by the wayside in everyday use, but are still on the books, so Mapquest uses them.
Yes, there are counter-examples to what I've just said. Note the words "almost always", "most" and "some".