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The Google-fication of Yahoo!

Posted by Soulskill on from the they're-feeling-lucky dept.

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.'"

12 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. The obvious next shoe to drop... by Mike+Van+Pelt · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Good by tooyoung · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Good by locopuyo · · Score: 5, Funny

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

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      The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
    2. Re:Good by MozeeToby · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Good by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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    4. Re:Good by Ami+Ganguli · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
    5. Re:Good by Dogtanian · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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    6. Re:Good by mcgrew · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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!

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    7. Re:Good by BigBunion · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  3. I use Yahoo to avoid Google by cpu6502 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  4. Re:Goohoo by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  5. Re:I wondered about the quotes... by jhoff · · Score: 5, Informative

    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