Slashdot Mirror
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."
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/
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.
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.
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.
It's referring to the fact that everybody loves the underdog (e.g. Google, Red Sox) and everybody hates the established monolith (e.g. Yahoo, Yankees).
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.
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.
- 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.
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.