The Google-fication of Yahoo!

Hugh Pickens writes "Since coming to Yahoo!, CEO Marissa Mayer has added a weekly, Friday afternoon all-hands meeting, just like at Google; she announced that henceforth the food in Yahoo's URLs Cafe will be free, just like at Google; and she has begun prepping major changes to the layout of the work spaces and buildings of Yahoo to make it feel more collaborative and cool, just like, well.. you get the idea. Such focus on improving cultural issues is an interesting initial move by the neophyte CEO, since the care and feeding and, most of all, cosseting of employees has been a critical element to Google's success at creating an always-sunny work environment. But Mayer has been up to much more serious business, said several sources, especially product innovation as the savior for Yahoo: Better email! Better search! Better ad-serving! And a special plea to make Flickr awesome again! In other words, better every product Yahoo has to offer. 'This is the sound of Yahoo becoming a technology company again,' says one source. 'It will be all about platforms and products.' Sources say that will likely mean a big splashy tech or product deal in the days ahead, perhaps via an acquisition to signal the new direction, perhaps with the acquisition of a sexy product like Flipboard. In the meantime, many at Yahoo are bracing for a pack of current and former Googlers — Mayer had a lot of loyal staffers — to come on board, writes Kara Swisher. 'And, by the looks of all the Googley changes at Yahoo, they'll feel right at home when they get there.'"

Comments

The obvious next shoe to drop...

[Mike Van Pelt]

Cue "Workplace Culture Patent Violation" lawsuit in 3... 2... 1...

Good

[tooyoung]

I hope that they succeed. It would be nice to have multiple viable search, etc solutions, rather than one good provider and awful competitors.

Re:Good

[locopuyo]

Yahoo search used to be powered by Google. Now it is powered by Bing. Which is powered by Google.

Re:Good

[MozeeToby]

It's amazing that a CEO can come in and say "Make a better product!" and it comes as a shock to everyone. And I don't want to take away from what she's doing, on the contrary, I applaud it. Focusing on employees and quality products versus focusing on financials and Wall Street is a huge step in the right direction for any company. It's just sad that it's newsworthy.

Re:Good

[Hatta]

Hell, it would be nice to have one good search engine at this point.

Re:Good

[Ami Ganguli]

Hear hear!

It's sad to see clueless MBAs come into tech companies and try to cut their way to profitability. It never works, but they keep trying it again and again (cue famous quote about the definition of insanity...).

About time somebody tried a different approach: take care of your people, and build great products. And remember that nobody does great work with an axe hanging over their head.

Time to buy some Yahoo! stock - they've found themselves a CEO with a clue.

Re:Good

[TheRaven64]

Oh, FFS, that's the second time this crap has been repeated in this thread. Bing does not use Google Search, but it does use the results from the Bing Toolbar. Some 'clever' Google engineers sent some pages containing links to nonsensical search terms to Bing via the Bing Toolbar and then, amazingly, these became the Bing results for these search terms. The Google Toolbar does the same thing, and you could no doubt use it to produce some choice search results on Google for nonsense terms too.

Re:Good

[Dogtanian]

It's sad to see clueless MBAs come into tech companies and try to cut their way to profitability. It never works, but they keep trying it again and again (cue famous quote about the definition of insanity...).

No, it does work- for them. The aim is to raise profits in the short term- which is also what the markets are concerned with- while they're still at the company and collecting large pay packets, bonuses, etc. etc.

The fact that this doesn't work over the long term is irrelevant, as they'll be long out of the company by that point.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

No, AC, go fuck yourself. There is no controversy over whether MS pilfered Google's results. They admitted it. The manufactured spin in this case that you girls drink like spiked Kool-Aid is that somehow that's "okay" because their toolbar users clicked through an installer allowing them to do it. Nobody reads those and MS took advantage of that fact to steal search results. You apologist drones are a pestilence.

I'm not the AC you are trading fucks with, but this is not precise, in case you or anyone care. The toolbar was one of many signals used to train the search algo (Google does the same with Chrome btw.), learning from user behavior, not watching Google specifically. What the group of 20 Google engineers did when they installed the toolbar and did coordinated synthetic search+click-throughs was effectively that they poisened this signal. A Google-bomb no less. They managed to do this, but surprisingly only in 7-9 of their 100 attempts (per Google blog), because Bing didn't have any other signals for these forced synthetic cases (they were created, not real). What Bing should have done is of course to ignore such a singel signal completely, but to make of this that Bing is copying Google is either disingenious or blissful ignorance.

Google's accusations was called silly by most search industry analysts an experts (Google it :) and even Dan Sullivan who was one of the key drivers of the "copy"-story in the beginning stated later when learning more about what was happening that he regretted his original headline and how this created a misconception (the one still being promoted here).

Re:Good

[mcgrew]

Indeed, Google used to be great, but they're like slashdot in that every change makes it worse. If there were no relevant results, Google used to tell you that. Now they serve up pages that don't even have all the words you're searching for, even if you specifically tell it to only return results with that word. Quotes are useless in a Google search any more.

There's a fantastic opportunity for some young talent to invent a better search engine. Ten years ago I could find anything I was looking for, these days Google fails miserably.

That said, Bing is even worse. Every two results return a shopping site on Bing, even if you're looking for technical information. Google only looks good compared to the other worthless search engines. One of you young guys should hop to it!

Re:Good

[publiclurker]

How about a garage sale.

Re:Good

[BigBunion]

Or God-forbid, fly on a plane with other commoners!

Goohoo

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Personally I don't think its the best idea to try and turn Yahoo into Google, it needs to find its own strengths and play to them, and tackle new markets where there aren't many established superplayers just yet, in order to compete on a more even footing.

Re:Goohoo

[squiggleslash]

Yeah, that though would have been OK 15 years ago. Yahoo had its own strengths, it was an innovator, and did some awesome stuff like the first genuinely useful webmail, the my.yahoo.com thing, and - OK, probably not as useful if implemented today - but the original directory based search was awesome at the time.

But it doesn't really have any strengths right now. It's a husk of its former self, a company that' had no ideas how to run itself as it got larger, and thought "I know, let's just copy all the other faceless corporations" was a great way to fix everything. Its founders left because they neither understood how large corporations work, nor understood the problems that go with that way of working - the stifling, anti-creativity, anti-individualism that such corporations inflict upon their employee base.

And it's hard, really, to think of a technology company that's following that model that's actually doing OK at the moment. Maybe Amazon is there, I don't know, but Amazon has a Jobs-lite like character at the top, so it just about gets away with it.

Copying the way Google works? Well, Google is innovative, encourages its employees to be creative, and seems to be being rewarded for doing so. If you're a large Internet concern that's been going in the wrong direction for a while, looking over at Google seems to be a good approach.

Re:Goohoo

[jbolden]

OK, probably not as useful if implemented today - but the original directory based search was awesome at the time.

Speak for yourself. I'd love a really good directory based search. The web is just much larger. Imagine being able to type in something like, "mail systems api" or "sound file formats" and getting a directory of 6-25 sites all on that topic rather than having to hunt.

Sweet

[EdIII]

she announced that henceforth the food in Yahoo's URLs Cafe will be free, just like at Google;

That goes a long way to creating a happy work place right there.

15 years ago I worked in a place where it took you 10-12 minutes to get past security, walk through the building, across a large area, go up an elevator, get in your car, go through two more security checkpoints, just to get on the main street. Half your lunch break was spent in transit, and you were only allowed 45 minutes.

You were not allowed to eat at your desks, and no break room was provided. Well, it did exist, but it was more like a closet hallway with a two seat mini table. Not set up to allow dozens of people to eat lunch.

There was a 3rd option.... the cafe at the bottom of the building where the owner realized he had a captive audience and made airport food prices seem cheap in comparison.

Yeah... something like this at Yahoo would seem like paradise to me.

We Have To Modernize

[MightyMartian]

We have to modernize Yahoo so that when Microsoft and Google want to buy us out we can demand top price!

The Rise of Flickr

[SuperKendall]

The thing that excites me most is the possibility of Flickr getting some real momentum behind it again. Even now I still prefer Flickr over other photo sharing services, and it would be great to see it get first class status among the users of the internet.

Missing the point

[Shoten]

"since the care and feeding and, most of all, cosseting of employees has been a critical element to Google's success at creating an always-sunny work environment"

Actually, the first and foremost reason for Google's success has been its people. And Yahoo has been taking a beating long enough not to have the same caliber of individuals at this point...so cosseting them isn't exactly going to give the same results as Google gets for taking care of their own employees. Not that it isn't a good idea, but I think Yahoo needs to come up with more compelling reasons to work for them, instead of an up-and-comer (which they absolutely are not, unfortunately). I'm a huge fan of companies providing perks for their people; both scientific studies and my own personal experience show that you get a much bigger ROI on those than on straight salary bumps, for the most part. But they aren't going to improve your company's bottom line automatically.

I use Yahoo to avoid Google

[cpu6502]

Yahoo mail to avoid google mail
Yahoo (or duckduckgo) to avoid google search
Mozilla or Opera browser to avoid google browser
And so on.
I have not found a workaround for youtube, but I don't like having google gathering all this data about me & creating a profile. I want to use alternatives as much as possible.

Re:I use Yahoo to avoid Google

[glwtta]

On the off-chance you're actually serious - you really think Yahoo isn't collecting exactly the same data as Google?

Fix Yahoo / Flickr

[Wowsers]

I propose that Yahoo gets it's finger out of it's backside and fix Flickr. For months I've been trying to get a "pro" account to upload more photograhs than the standard freebie 200. However like many other complaints in the forums, Yahoo seem to not be bothered in fixing the billing system, many can't log in to even create a billing account, others can't pay or renew what they have. Sounds a bigger problem then just re-arranging how the chairs and desks are in an office for better Feng shui.

Re:Fix Yahoo / Flickr

[Sir_Sri]

This sort of thing is where I think it's important that the CEO of a company drink the proverbial kool-aid and actually try and use their own products. Mayer is a geek - if she tries to use any yahoo services she'll probably find what is redundant, what is broken, and what is missing. All things yahoo needs. Badly.

What about platforms

[Spy Handler]

Marissa should bring Steve Regge onboard so he can teach Yahoo people to eat their own dogfood and build a common platform around Flickr and YIM that will be API accessible for 3rd party developers to develop an ecosystem!

Re:Googlizing won't save Yahoo.

[metrometro]

Not sufficient, true. But the thing a new CEO needs most of all is time, and making some trivial but highly visible and generally popular changes that can be implemented in hours will buy her the time to actually address real problems, while giving the press something to talk about besides her uterus. The lady ain't dumb.

Re:It's already working

[Stiletto]

Huh??? From what I have heard, Google's pay is by far the best in the 'Valley, both cash only and total (including stock/benefits). That said, you're not going to get rich working for either them or Yahoo. You only make it big here by lucking into an employee-number-[2..20] role.

Re:I wondered about the quotes...

[jhoff]

I work on web search at Google, and I can assure you that there is no such -req operator. All that you're doing is filtering out results that match the word "req". :-)

When you find a query where you think you need lots of quotes, you might be interested in Verbatim mode, which can be enabled in the left-hand search tools:
http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1734130&topic=1221265&ctx=topic

Here's the official list of supported search operators:
http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=136861

There are also some legacy operators like [inurl:foo], [intitle:foo], and [allintitle: foo bar baz]. http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html