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Yahoo Tops Portal Market In Visitors
linumax writes "Yahoo Inc. continues to lead the portal market in the number of unique visitors, and is also the top destination for news, a market research firm says. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company led the top 10 Web sites among U.S. home and work Internet users with 101.3 million visitors in August, EMarketer Inc., said. Second was Microsoft Corp.'s site with 95.6 million, followed by its MSN portal, 92.1 million; Google, 80.4 million; America Online Inc., 75.7 million; EBay Inc., 55.2 million; MapQuest, 39 million; Amazon.com, 37.6 million, RealNetworks, 36.4 million; and the Weather Channel, 31.2 million."
I'd argue that raw numbers don't matter with respect to Yahoo. I mean sure, they're paying a whole lot in bandwidth and all, but their site is so cluttered that I never have any idea what I'm looking at. There could be ads for free hundred dollar bills and I wouldn't even notice.
I can't tell you how many times I've gone to yahoo to find their directory of sites and given up and gone to DMOZ instead.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
I seem to always go to yahoo.com when ever I search for something and rarely use any other search engine like google. I have no idea though because personally I don't care what search engine Im using but I do usually default to yahoo first.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
I've been a Google user for years, but I am starting to use Yahoo more often. At first it started because I was at Yahoo for a different reason, and the search was there, so I did it. Boom, less spam results. I went to Google to compare and there is more spam in the rankings.
Try searching for a review of a commerical product like a TV by model number. Google will fill the search with places selling the product, not with reviews. If Eopinions or Amazon does not have a review, you're screwed. You'll be buying blind.
Google to me was most usefull as a NON-COMMERCIAL tool, to find information, not sellers. There are plenty of places to buy, and I know their websites. I don't need google to show me electronic stores.
I think it may be due to the fact that programs like realplayer usually go to a homepage when you launch the program. As far as I can tell its just an ordinary web browser built into the program, so they probably included those visits in their numbers.
..and in yesterday's news, new study finds that 'Google Users more Wealthy, Net Savvy', which confirms something I've known for quite some time now:
We're outnumbered.
They are the tabloids of the web, even blogs like theregister are higher quality.
Wouldn't it be better to calculate which portal is the top portal based on the actual number of users that click a portal link?
I have customers who leave yahoo.com as their home page but always click a bookmark or head to another search engine to actually start browsing. I have no idea why people don't change the home page, but even some of my family works this way. Every time they open their web browser, yahoo pops up, and then they head off in a different direction.
With the various search toolbars, will the portal be as important as it was over the past decade? My homepage is blank -- especially on my primary browser, my PDA. Even with a fast connection I don't like the delay in popping up a start page.
I go look at yahoo about once every few months and just can't handle the site. Too much text, way too many colors, and it doesn't respond very quickly on some of my older (IE-based) PCs. I guess the average person doesn't have very much knowledge of proper use of color, text and overall layout. Yahoo reminds me of the beach blanket bingo madness from the 60s.
That is probably at least partly true. I use "my.yahoo.com" because I've been using it for something like 10 years now. I even ran the Yahoo! ticker for a while. Even though I've switched to new accounts on Yahoo! at least three times that I can recall, I still go back to it because I'm used to how it works. That comfort level is worth something, no matter how much I enjoy learning/using new "stuff".
Huh?
I completely disagree. Yahoo! has been innovating in many areas since they first began. Not necessarily in bells and whistles (although they do tend to have lots of good features) but in core technology, uptime, and performance. I'm not sure what half-assed product you're referring to in particular (I'm guessing you're choosing to compare Y!Mail with GMail, since its hip to give google the advantage there), but in general Yahoo! has been a huge innovator in web technology (specifically portal related), and continues to put out quality services on all fronts.
I don't want to be a falmebait but the title of the story is kinda wrong. I tought that "wow, yahoo has more users than google? MSN has more users than google? REAL has more users than google?" It comes out that the stats are for U.S. only.
The titel should read: "Yahoo Tops Portal Market In Visitors in US" or something like that.
though not surprised by the large number of /.ers on this topic whose comments are so Google-worshipping. Google has done some very good things, but I think people should give Yahoo a little credit for having come out with a very large number of services, often beating others (including Google) to the web with that service. Maybe, just *maybe*, that's being reflected a *little* in these numbers? I'm not trying to flame Google, or say Yahoo is the bee's knees (god i feel old), but I certainly think that Yahoo deserves a little more credit than people give it. Google has all these great tools, most of which I've been using courtesy of Yahoo long before Google offered them. No, numbers != quality necessarily, but "Google" does not automatically equal "best" or "quality" either. Of all people, we, the people here ought to be most interested in choosing a toolset for its quality, not the press it gets, or the company that makes it.
MSN is the default IE browser homepage.
Yahoo the default browser homepage for many DSL providers, including SBC.
Both are the "choice" of people who don't make choices.
Google is a default homepage for people who choose to download Firefox.
Google is also clearly what most people are using to search the web (webmasters, check your web stats - its 85% Google referrals)
So Google is the choice for people who actually choose.
Looking at Yahoo/MSN vs Google's approach makes that pretty obvious: Google is a tool to use, while Yahoo/MSN is for tools to use.
Ohohoho.
.com smackdown? The day-trading fad? Startups spending too much money on Superbowl ads and fancy office chairs?
Because the stock market is run by people who vote with their money, and therefore by people who try to make the most informed decisions they can.
It's not "run" by anybody, except in the sense that exchanges provide a platform and certain rules such as those regarding circuit breakers.
Remember the
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
As a quick look at Alexa would point out, 50% of pages on yahoo are on mail.yahoo.com. 90% or more of those pages are refreshes to see messgages or even your inbox because of how their mail reader system works.
Compare that to the G-mail system (only 6% of their pages by Alexa's count link) that's smart enough to allow you to check all your mail without a page refresh something like Alexa will pick up. That's where so many of Yahoo's page views come from: a dumb mail system.
Google's numbers are 2-3 times lower!
So that tells us you need two to three less pages to find what you want at google. Which is why I google, and I don't yahoo.
You can't take the sky from me...