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.'"

Innovation

it's already game over in search

That's a great attitude for promoting competition and innovation! It's good to hear we'll never see any new ideas come out of these companies.

Re:Innovation

Many times in the computer world it has been pronounce "game over" and many times the game has changed. (think WordStar, EasyCalc, Lotus123, MS-DOS, MSIE, and yes, Windows and MS Office).

The market leader always likes to tell people "don't even try to beat us" but people can and will beat them.

the analogy police might arrest me for this, but..

Isn't that like saying "IBM yields OS Dominance to Microsoft" when talking about IBM PC-DOS or OS/2 vs. Windows XP? :)

my only fear is...

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...

Re:my only fear is...

I doubt it will be as simple as tossing their 'do no evil' mandate, but rather the law of unintended consequences will take hold as they grow. Things they think are harmless or even good can and probably will have effects they cannot control. This is especially difficult as one tries to balance the ethical dilemma of doing 'no evil' to shareholders as well as users simultaneously.

Just a matter of time

First it was altavista then yahoo and google. Lets see who is next :)

Yahoo in neutral

"We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google," Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."

"maintain our market share" is what's interesting. She doesn't even say increase. That is not a good sign for Yahoo's search business.

I can imaging Ask employees giddy with glee seeing that search engine #2 has consciously put their search market share in neutral.

-Pete

Take a leap!

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.

Hi, I'm Yahoo. My mistakes teach me nothing.

Hello, my name is Yahoo. During the dot-com boom, I forgot search was important and let Google take over my core franchise. Then in 2002 I spent $235 million [yahoo.com] buying Inktomi to try and catch up and create the "highest quality search."

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 [m-w.com].

Thank you, and have a nice day.

only a message to investors

This doesn't mean Yahoo is going to abandon searching by any means. Instead I think this is a message to investors not to grade them by their search marketshare becuase they don't consider that important anymore. If anything, this opens up the door to more innovation because they can be the quiet underdog. Yahoo can focus more on R&D and let google try to struggle to maintain dominance when investors are breathing down their necks about profit numbers and market share

Not too long ago, didn't AMD essentially throw in the towel to Intel by saying they weren't going to compete for the fastest processor anymore? And look at what they are offering today with their 64bit processors. As long as yahoo continues to innovate they aren't dead

Google was the victor. They still are (for now).

But even a quick look will show you that Google is aware of their preeminence in the search engine arena. While they are still innovating, I'm just waiting for them to become so caught up in their own greatness that they kick back and rest on their laurels.

Because that's when somebody'll come up with "a better mousetrap" and unseat the reigning kings of search. Anybody here remember Browser War I (BW I)? Microsoft won that one and suddenly Insecure Exploder didn't need to be improved any more.

Sorta like the way Wal-Mart grew up (hellfire, I can remember driving out of the city to a rural area just to shop at Wal-mart. Now that they're a retailing juggernaut I avoid Wal-mart whenever possible - their customer service sucks almost as bad as their mostly-imported product lines).

Very interesting coincidence

The /. quote on the bottom of this page:

Lack of capability is usually disguised by lack of interest.

Quality of Google Search has decreased however...

It used to be that technical searches (the kind you use at work when searching for code snippets, general help, etc.) turned up some excellent result using Google. Back when AltaVista was still around, I switched to google because Google had great result lists.

In the past year or so, there are just too many junk results. Sites which exist only to flood us with google ads; sites that are fake (you know the ones, with obviously bulk generated text to "match" your search); and poor "help" sites which also seem to exist just for ad revenue...

The next "google" will be the one that filters out the garbage, and brings the result lists back to the way they were 1999-2001...actually, Google will probably allow us to mark results as bogus, like a personal "black list". Maybe they allow this already?

happy or sad?

Yahoo must be confused as to whether it should be happy or sad, happy that it had invested in the then startup called Google, or sad that the small baby has overtaken the daddy himself!

Good Move

I'm not really surprised, it seems like there is far more scope for improvement in turning the web into a useful platform than there is in trying to make a search engine epsilon better than Google's. In the tech industry it seems you only supplant the incumbant in his own domain by being an order of magnitude better, as Google did in the 90's. Maybe search just doesn't have any potential order-of-magnitude improvements that could help Yahoo leapfrog Google. Perhaps they're better off staking their place in the next revolution - the web as a platform.

Conan, what is best in life?

To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.

The new elite industries...

'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.'

It's not just coincedence that Google only hires the best and brightest to work for them.

So is this going to be the future of industry in the U.S.? Whoever gets the brightest and smartest, not only wins, but dominates for generations to come?

If so, the populace is woefully unprepared. Considering that teachers are largely mediocre, the educational system is underfunded and in many areas of society education just isn't really that important, what will happen to a declining, undereducated workforce in the next 50 years?

Looking out for #1

"It really ought to be their goal" to be No. 1, he said. "Whether it's realistic or not."

I'm a big dreamer. I shoot for unrealistic goals all the time and it totally works for me.

Well, I for one

I for one have been using google for over 6 years now - and the search results have always been EXACT. I have never liked the link whore page that is Yahoo, and before that I used "Infoseek" (1996) because it had "Search within results" - after they became "Go" it went downhill and I switched to google. I have never seen an instance where Google hasn't delivered on its promises, for all but 1 period of time. I remember being frustrated in late 2002 early 2003 when the search results were including meaningless blogs. I didnt give a damn about other people's opinions in my search, I just wanted to get to the page I searched on two months ago. At any rate, Google fixed that, has gone public, and has been offering a number of quality services since. With the aquisition of Keyhole, the advent of google local, froogle, News, alerts, and specifically GMail and Google Talk, google deliver what I want as a customer. I want a lightweight experience that *I* can add to if I choose. I *LIKE* the google talk client because it doesnt have 283423492340234 smilies, and all the other 'crap'. I like GMAIL and Google search for its simplicity and un-cluttered look. A google search within my email? Thank you, Lord. To say that Yahoo may still innovate and stuff - good for them, let them innovate, but if there is a Google branded product, I'd be more apt to go for it first: I'll let a computer analyze my email for targetted ads a lot faster than I'd allow the Yahoo toolbar, for Y! messenger get installed. Yahoo Messenger - "Idiot" Messenger, think about it. Google has held true to its very explicit privacy policies, and makes known EXACTLY what will be going on in a short, readable paragraph or two.

Makes sense. Yahoo is much more than "search."

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...

Makes Sense....

I use Yahoo for many things every day - maps, email (yes, I like Yahoo's implementation of both of these better than Google's), weather, yellow pages, movie times, you name it. General searching? Never. They do plenty of other things (many of which could be thought of as very narrow search engines, like for movie times or weather), I can see why they don't want to put all their effort into competing with Google for the general search market. They're not giving up, they're just choosing to focus on other parts of their business.

Horsepucky!

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.

Yahoo Calendar

Yahoo Mail's integrated calendaring ability makes it more useful to many people than Google Gmail. I think Gmail needs to add a calendaring function.

Maybe if yahoo!

Maybe if Yahoo! took all the crap off their main page like Goggle did people would go back to them. Goggle's clean front page is the only reason i switched from yahoo to goggle.

Not a serach engine...

I think it is important to point out that Yahoo! is not a search engine, it is a directory. People hand pick the websites at Yahoo! unlike google's web crawlers which are automated. So technically they aren't even in the same category. But the above article still applies. Just a little fact I thought I would throw in.

Yahoo has gotten better

I've got to say Yahoo has impressed me lately. Not in search, which still pales compared to Google, but in everything surrounding it.

1) Less clutter. They still have the occassional (highly annoying) Flash ads, but a year or two ago people screamed at them for literally clogging the pages with ads. Today they've scaled them back quite a bit, and the content vastly outnumbers the ads (which it should).
2.) Yahoo Mail Beta. If you get a chance to use this thing, do it. It's f'ing amazing. Think Outlook in a website. Works great on Firefox. Easily blows the doors off even Google Maps in terms of sheer "How the hell did they program that?" One can argue whether or not Outlook in a website is a good idea (I love it) but you can't help but be impressed by the programming.
3.) Yahoo News. Sorry, Google still owns search, but their news site (even out of beta)... lacks. Yahoo cleanly brings a ton of sources together with a lot of great photos. Browsing the "Most Viewed Photos" is fun (even if it results in seeing one-eyes cats).
4.) Yahoo Widgets. Which they bouugh (Konfabulator). Excellent acquisiton. Konfabulator's always been awesome (I've programmed a number of widgets) and the graphical polish is way better than anything you see on most Windows apps.
5.) Yahoo Groups. Still the best source for free pr0n. I mean... a great way to get friends and family together. ;)

I still use Google all the time for search, but Yahoo is commanding more and more of my attention for everything else. If they used Google as the search engine, I'd probably head there full time.

Reminds me of the old days

Maybe Yahoo! should start using a LISP again.

Search Logs

At least Google is trying to fight against handing over their (our?) search logs. According to the articles shown here about this incident, Yahoo! and Microsoft already complied with the demand to give the logs, and I think that such a coward company, that has no guts to fight our government, should not have their products used.

All i want for Christmas is to be #3...

granted that google seems to be the monster that can't be killed, but when was the last time you were in a meeting and your boss says "ok people, this year we are aiming for #3!" It's sad don't you think?

How to knock Google off the top of the hill...

Make the top 10 search results actually relevent again.

Google is rapidly becoming a disappointment for me. Or rather, I'm quickly learning after doing a Google search to immediately click to page 2 of the results to see the "real" results.

Page 1 of the results seem to largely be irrelevent to what I'm /really/ searching for - it is far more relevent to people who have paid to have their URL returned when my keyword is typed in.

I can't tell you how many times I've typed in "chicken" (or whatever) and been presented with a top-10 list of "results" for web sites that have absolutely nothing to do with chicken - they've just paid someone to make sure their web site /appeared/ to be associated with chicken.

You want to beat Google? Find a way to make a search engine that doesn't pad the results with irrelevent paid advertising.

Interestingly, I'm finding the "legitimate" paid results - those down the right side of the screen, to often be more relevent to my searches than the top 10 URLs presented in the actual search body.

Steve

Redundant, but...

... we are speaking here of different beasts. Yahoo started as directory, google as raw search engine. Then yahoo moved to community, and google keeped as mainly search engine... maybe a lot of services (mail, news, maps, groups) but one of the things that makes them bright is the search.

As search, i think is almost a monopoly. Not only their website is the default search for most people, but most browsers and desktop apps that have the possibility of an internet search use it, and is the default "plugin" for most websites. In fact, i think that google could be a good monopoly of not content by itself, but the generic "engine" behind (search, maps, talking, etc)

Yahoo focus is a bit different, they are building communities, portals, etc, and there they are the dominant party. They could switch to using google as search engine and dont lose visitors or value, because the target is different.

Of course, google can play a catch up game and really start to build competing communities and portals, but i dont think so, looks like they are building a minimum implementation of features to make those features the base that anyone related must reach to succeed (think in gmail 1gb space). In any case, is a good opportunity (for both and for whoever want to enter those games) to improve, both in reach (i.e. yahoo maps is too focused in us/canada) as in intelligence (making it easier/more integrated/more usable)

Yahoo failed with its directories

I could never get a site of mine listed in any category, even personal, on Yahoo. They take forever and you have to practically pay them off to have have a shot at getting listed, even though they have a freebie option. If they'd open up their directory to a "community-maintained and policed" system, they'd have an incredibly useful system. Imagine if a Yahoo user could add a comment to an entry saying, "I found this useful for researching topic XYZ." You could have tons of metadata to enhance the search engine, and categories could be peer-moderated by people who pay a $5 processing fee to Yahoo to have a Yahoo rep receive a photo ID by fax proving that you're a real person, not some troll signing up for the 15th time in a row.

Yahoo could have made a lot of money if they'd bought Google, let them take over the entire search and directory side of Yahoo and opened up the directories to a community process.

Ironic

It's ironic that this story was posted today. Only 3 hours ago I used the Yahoo search engine for the first time ever. Google has been serving me a ton of broken cache links over the last few weeks, and today I finally had enough. Google also needs a way to turn off their supplemental search results. If there are only 2 or 3 hits on something then that's all I need to see. I don't need 3 extra pages of dreck. I got modded as a troll for posting these sentiments in a different story the other day but I am completely serious. I have had Google as my home page for 5 years now and I'm not abandoning it. I'm just saying that if Google wants to maintain their overall superiority and excellence of quality there are a few things they need to attend to.

We're number 2, so we try harder

Yahoo should take a lesson from Avis...

Woo! Go Yahoo!

We're Number 2! We're Number 2!

analysts...

Isn't it interesting how in each such article there's a shithead sitting on the fence and giving advice to the guys who do the work?

"It kind of makes you wonder about how serious they are about search," said Danny Sullivan, editor of London-based SearchEngineWatch.com, which tracks the search industry. "It really ought to be their goal" to be No. 1, he said. "Whether it's realistic or not." That "whether it's realistic or not" cracked me up.

It shows how true is the old adage "who can, does, who can't, teaches".

ITEOTIAWKIAIFF

It's the end of the Internet as we know it, and I feel fine.

Same thing can be said the other way around...

'In some countries, it's already game over in search, with Google the clear victor,'

But don't people in China, Taiwan, and Japan all use Yahoo!?

China is a very important market; coincidentally, there's news today about Google agreeing to censor results in China.

Re:Dupe

Uhmmm, that's not a dupe... but why isn't it funny???

I probably see about 25% of the stories on slashdot before they appear on slashdot

Re:Dupe

Then ignore it on slashdot.