Yahoo used to be a great place to start when you wanted to find Internet sites by catagory. Now it can be difficult to find a reference to a relevant site outside of Yahoo (many of Yahoo's entries point to Yahoo). What's worse, their entries mislead. Example: Searching for price comparisons can lead you to Yahoo's price comparison. Using Yahoo's price comparison search lists Yahoo partnered sites only. Guess what: Yahoo partnered sites aren't necessarily the low price source (obvious to the savy internet shopper but not necessarily obvious to the internet newbie). The problem is that Yahoo used to encompass the web; now it only encompasses Yahoo's partners (when it comes to spending money). And so the smart shopper searches elsewhere, thereby contributing to Yahoo's troubles.
Personally, I no longer start a newbie out by telling them to start with Yahoo if they want to find stuff on the web. Google is my choice these days (not a lot of censorship plus they still link the whole web). As an aside, I met the announcement that Google was picked by Yahoo to provide their search system with some amount of trepidation. I would say that so far my fears were unfounded.
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Personally, I no longer start a newbie out by telling them to start with Yahoo if they want to find stuff on the web. Google is my choice these days (not a lot of censorship plus they still link the whole web). As an aside, I met the announcement that Google was picked by Yahoo to provide their search system with some amount of trepidation. I would say that so far my fears were unfounded.