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Yahoo Seeking Partnership With News Corp.
rattlesoft tips us to a Washington Post report that Yahoo is now seeking a partnership with News Corp. A related Reuters article notes that analysts are skeptical of such a deal. From the Post:
"Yahoo is talking with a number of potential partners, possibly as a way to either stave off future Microsoft offers or in an effort to drive up the software giant's offer. The talks between News Corp. and Yahoo ... may signal a resumption of discussions that took place last summer between the two media giants that quieted during the fall. Such a combination would make News Corp. the largest single shareholder in a Yahoo/Fox Interactive unit. That would marry the world's most popular social-networking site, MySpace, with Yahoo's 4 billion page views per month to make a formidable opponent for Google."
Just what we need -- another of the major players in Web content to fall under the News Corporation sphere of influence. As though they don't already do enough harm as it is, with their holdings in the traditional press...
Sounds like a marriage made in heaven.
Ed
A major search engine aligned with Faux News. Talk about a propaganda mouthpiece...
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Time, is what you are missing...
with the combined effort, and more importantly financial backing, Yahoo could over a year or two become equal or even greater than Google in many possibly most ways, even if they have to do it by buying out smaller companies, thus buying loyalty aswell as new customers.
No I think you're missing it.
Try this...
Type google.com into you address bar. You get a nice simple page with a box you type you query into.
Now type yahoo.com. You get the kind of web pages that makes my eyes bleed with all the flashing stuff. Takes you a few seconds to fine the search box yeah?
This is, in its simplest form, why yahoo isnt going to come anywhere near google.
(and dont mention search.yahoo.com, cause my wife/grandmother/uncle/lowIQ friend is never going to figure that out)
All this will do is obfuscate Yahoo! (tm) that much more. I like this deal more than the MS one, just because I shudder to think of the effect of the loss of either hotmail or yahoo mail or yahoo IM or MSN Instant Messenger on millions of users. And to date, I havent seen much positive come from the companies MS has procured, usually their services wither and die, while some parts get "assimilated".
This potential deal does not make Yahoo/News Corp competitive with Google. Yahoo gets millions of hits from users who are looking for YAHOO CONTENT and SERVICES, Google gets millions of hits from users looking for other sites content or using Google's services which dont cleanly map against Yahoo. The only arguably competitive services are search, web email, and maps. I would argue that yahoo is already equal in search quality, close to parity in web email, and much superior in maps (google maps has given me faulty directions and even put addresses in the wrong places enough times that I switched back to Yahoo for that service). The thing is though, there is no incentive for users to switch over to Yahoo from Google. In order for them to actually line up competitively, Yahoo would require major architectural changes in the way they present themselves on the web, which would throw off many years of work for questionable results. I don't see it. I think if Yahoo! is going to be profitable again, they need to come up with "the next Big Thing", simply looking over at Google and saying were gonna compete with them isnt going to do it. Their web-presence is already cluttered to death, adding to it won't attract google's core search audience (people looking for clean simple accurate web search interface).
That Rupert Murdoch is actually MUCH worse than Bill Gates?
Load time.
I'm on dial-up on one computer and several months ago had to drop Yahoo as my home page because of the bloat. You know how sometimes you want to use the Home icon to bail out of a situation. You want to know ASAP that things have stabilized.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
Neither agreeing nor disagreeing with you, but pointing out that a bias can also be expressed in the selection and especially the omission of stories. Which I believe Fox is a case with Fox.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
The beauty of the internet, though, is that there are so many people and resources connected, all the time, that even if Yahoo became solely a right-winged-whack-job propaganda machine, there would still be a million-billion-zillion other places to look for your information. If people can't be bothered to corroborate what they read in the "news" when they've got the entire world's worth of knowledge available then no amount of legislation will fix that. If anything, legislation will make the problem worse, because any such law about truth in internetting will be all but impossible to enforce, but it will make the online news agencies seem just that much more credible to the gullible masses who believe that governments and corporations are out for their best interests.