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Yahoo! Yields Search Dominance to Google
Unsichtbarer_Mensch wrote to mention a Seattle PI story in which Yahoo! CFO Susan Decker states that they're not aiming to be the No. 1 Search engine. From the article: "Yahoo!'s comments underline the difficulties any Internet company faces in trying to challenge Google's dominance of the Web search industry. Google has at least double the market share of Yahoo! and Microsoft Corp. in Internet search, the largest and most profitable segment of online advertising. 'In some countries, it's already game over in search, with Google the clear victor,' said RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan in New York. 'Google's product development pipeline runs at such a fast rate that it's very difficult for any company, Microsoft or Yahoo! to catch up.'"
I've loved google in the past, but my only fear is that as they evolve into a defacto monopoly, their "do no evil" bit will be tossed. One dominant provider of any service (monopoly) is never a good thing, no matter how good the source started out. Power corrupts, and all that...
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Maybe they are not going to catch google at this "raw brute-force search engine game"... good for them! Why would one try to imitate such a primitive way of searching. Come on, this is the prehistory of search engines, there is so so much more to do. They should take a leap into next generation search engines. When I look for a movie, I go to imdb, when I look for a scientific article, I go directly to wikipedia... I wish I'd use only one site but I need to look for more than a movie title, I want to specify it is a movie, and if in my native language "movie" is written just like "baby diapers" I still want to be unambiguous... Google still relies VERY heavily on syntaxic tricks... there are so many "tricks" in Google maps it is sickening, just for the sake of keeping a single search bar. The future is clearly semantic, I think Google is seeing it with Google base but for the moment, this is their only "appearant" use.
\u262D = \u5350
Now, just as Google becomes choked with spamblogs and linkfarms and results bought and paid for by SEOs, I am once again ceding competitiveness in the most important part of Internet media.
If you are a shareholder, and this bothers you, please remember you bought stock in a company WHOSE NAME MEANS FUCKING IDIOT.
Thank you, and have a nice day.
I'm reasonably net-savvy, but wife is a computer layperson. She's quite "computer literate" but has no real depth technical understanding. She bought a Gateway about six years ago, choosing Gateway because the liked the Holstein motif. She specifically wanted it to be _her_ computer and wanted me _not_ to "help" her or hang over her shoulder or kibbitz.
When you double-clicked the IE icon, it brought you to a Gateway-badged version of the Yahoo home page. So, her network experience started with Yahoo and she never turned back.
By the time I offered to help her configure Outlook Express to work with our ISP's email, something I thought she might have trouble with, she said "But I already have email." She had signed up for a Yahoo account, and she thought and still thinks that there's no reason at all to use anything else. (And she was proved right when our ISP had some infuriating email outages, lasting several days each, and my email was interrupted while Yahoo's was completely unaffected).
She uses Yahoo weather, Yahoo maps, belongs to several Yahoo groups, books her plane flights with Yahoo travel, and so forth and so on. Yahoo is well-designed, engaging, caters to novices, and is a portal to many things that she wants to do on the Internet.
It is, in fact, all the things that AOL tried to be and wasn't.
The only thing she doesn't use Yahoo for is searching. Within about a month after Google launched, I discovered it and was impressed by how much better it was than either Yahoo or Altavista. I mentioned it to her, she tried it, she loved it, and has used nothing else since.
I have no idea at all what Lycos and all the others are up to these days...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Google's product development pipeline runs at such a fast rate that it's very difficult for any company, Microsoft or Yahoo! to catch up
Yeah, right, whatever. Although it sounds like a good excuse to give to one's own unhappy shareholders, Google's success has nothing to do with rapid "product development". Their core product hasn't changed (other than cute logos and the necessary shift from a 32bit limit a few years back) all that much, from the perspective of the end-user, since inception.
Not to say that Google doesn't keep coming out with cool new toys. But as much as they beat every clone to the punch with GMail, with their desktop search widget, and the rest of their toys - their core "product" still weighs in at 1.3k, fits on a 640x480 monitor, and has a single significant input field.
So why has Google kept their market against a player like Microsoft?
Because I don't need to wade through massive flash-hell to do a search. Because the search results page doesn't take great pains to obscure the content with the advertising. Because they told the DOJ to go pound sand rather than turn over my (and your) search histories. Because they just do what they do well, and found a way to make a tidy profit at that without annoying me. Because they proudly know "what is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?", when most companies would fire the developer who put in such a "useless" feature.
Because they "do no evil", put simply.