Yahoo to Dump Google

unassimilatible writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting (paid subscription required) that Yahoo! plans to dump Google as its primary search technology. In a major revamp, Yahoo will also add personalization and customization features to extend the usefulness of searches and expand its use of "paid inclusion." Yahoo news has picked up the story. Might be time to rethink that IPO."

Googling it..

[oateater]

My only question: How will this affect google's searching power?

Maybe Yahoo is changing for a reason

[Gary Whittles]

The problem with Google now is that it has almost entirely been taken over by commercial entities. When I was recently shopping for a digital camera, I did the usual internet searches. A few years back, similar searches would have found lots and lots of sites ABOUT the product in question (fan sites, discussion forums, reviews). Now I have to sort through page upon page of sites wanting to sell me said item, most of which aren't even actual store-fronts but instead just referral pages which have manipulated the Google ranking system to get on top. I recenlty hit the same problem when doing vacation planning. It used to be that I could easily find hundreds of pages ABOUT the destination, now I just find sites wanting to sell me airfare, book me into a hotel, and rent me a car. It's become extremely frustrating and has made Google far less useful than it once was. In fact, most of the big search engines are far less useful than they once were.

Yahoo used to be THE place to get organized info on any subject. Maybe they are switching to a better search engine, like DMOZ or Vivisimo?

Re:Yahoo bot?

[ThePretender]

would probably be Inktomi's bot (something like inktomisearch.com). There was an earlier post about this transition being obvious since Yahoo owns Inktomi and Overture. So Inktomi would do the crawlin' and Overture would provide the paid results.

Re:More painful for Yahoo

[ThePretender]

The only effective use Yahoo's search has is to lure people in with the aforementioned huge name recognition. Once people are there, I think Yahoo is more interested in getting them to do things like sign up for Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Personals, go into Yahoo Chat, click on paid links and outright advertisements, yadda yadda.

Re:Maybe Yahoo is changing for a reason

[wilf]

use google more creatively, by typing the name of your product and the word "review" or "consumer review"...

or check out the information about digital cameras on photo.net

Why?

[Raven42rac]

Why is it time to rethink that IPO? Losing Yahoo as a paying customer will not hurt very much. There will just be another one to take their place. Google makes great search appliances for networks. They are gaudy yellow boxes, but they work very well. There is plenty of money in that. Look at all this other stuff [google.com] they can sell. They can sell advertising, search appliances, they can let you use their engine to search your site, and they can park domains for you. How will losing one customer on one sector of their business hurt them (badly)? Their eggs are not all in one basket. That would be like everyone saying "Ford is dying!" when someone stops buying their air freshener.

Re:Maybe Yahoo is changing for a reason

[xneilj]

I feel exactly the same as you. This commercial pollution has greatly diluted the usefulness of Google when searching for information on products.

I would love to see a way to optionally strip commercial traders from the results.

I do.

[NineNine]

Yahoo is the only site that I've found that really uses personalization. The "one login" promise that countless technologies were supposed to deliver on has been delivered by Yahoo. Forget LDAP and various XML schemes. I love Yahoo because no matter where I go in their empire, my login is good and the content is for me. I actually enjoy using Yahoo's various properties. In one day, I use their mail (excellent with spam), launch.com (streaming radio), their auctions, their weather, their finance, etc. I've been using the web since before the web, and Yahoo is the only place I've found that really delivers on that promise of personalization, which happens to be worth a lot to me because it saves me a lot of time and headache.

Re:Maybe Yahoo is changing for a reason

[steveit_is]

Or maybe Google's search results ARE accurate and simply reflect the increasingly commercial nature of the web. I for one think that the Internet is becoming soo hopelessly commercialized that it is becoming next to impossible to find USEFUL non-commercial content about anything, regardless of the search engine used. When 90% of the content on the web is commercial, it is hard to imagine 90% of the search results not being commercial. I think that the next 'killer app' will be a new anonymous file sharing protocol like Freenet ,but faster and with an ability to 'deny' hosting to sites that you do not agree with. Freenet with a way to filter the content your node will host. Not because people want anonymity soo much, but because people want a new forum to voice their opinions without their voices being drowned out by the combined shouting of all the commercial interests that have taken control of our medium.

Yahoo is free.

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

When Yahoo switched to Google as its primary search engine, it made Yahoo into nothing more than a Google frontend with a lot of wasted bandwidth on its pages. It was just google with a bloated site loaded to bear with ads, as if it was an MSN with a google search bar. Its only real difference in searching was those old directories with all the outdated pages from the 1990s.

Now that Yahoo will be using another search technology, there might be a reason for using Yahoo again. Some useful things that may never show up on Google might show up on Yahoo, so it might make for a useful alternate search engine now, especially if Google continues to slide as it's doing. Then again, we still have old Astalavista for that, as well.

Re:Googling it..

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

"the number of times it's used has no impact on how much knowledge it has about the web and what it does about it."

Thats not entirely true, if you take it the other way. The more popular google became, the more spammers realised its worth the time it takes to figure out how to manipulate the search engine until their page is on top. Google was much more useful when it was still on the list of effecient and useful geek-only tools, now that everyone either uses it directly or uses it via proxy(like yahoo was), the results are often times spam.

It's like Burgerking buying bugers from McDonalds

[amichalo]

I never really understood why Yahoo! switched to Google in the first place. The point is to differentiate. I stopped going to Yahoo! when I saw it was powered by Google - I just went to the "source". Same deal with MapQuest.

I guess I just don't find value in the portal service Yahoo offers. I also don't shop at Wal-Mart. I would rather use my bookmarks bar to go the site I like for Investment tools, another for maps, another for searching, and another for e-mail.

Re:Maybe Yahoo is changing for a reason

[Hollinger]

You know, I do the "review" thing too, and still get the same sorts of results -- possibly a different cross-section of them, but the same sorts of results, mostly due to the same reason, but also because every e-commerce engine under the sun seems to have a consumer review "feature." Look at this search for Canon ZR65MC review [google.com]. As you can see, the results still contain the same sort of things. You also get (fairly useless to me, anyway) 10-20 different sites rebadging the pricegrabber or dealtime engines, providing the same exact content with a different HTML template.

I agree that Google needs to do something about e-commerce sites. Perhaps finalize the froogle [google.com] beta and dump the e-tailers into there where they belong. (Of course I realize that it's very, very easy for me to say this, and extremely hard for Google to implement it.)

In the meantime, I can think of several ways to combat this sort of information glut. This search [google.com] provides much better results in my opinion, but can be easily combated by the spammers by removing the keywords I'm using as filters.

I don't envy google. Their own popularity is killing their usefulness as a search for retail products. For actual information, such as the governmental structure of Canada [google.com], I've found they're still the best engine though.

Re:The other shoe drops...

[Metasquares]

If someone found a way to abuse a search algorithm that you wrote to get better placement, wouldn't you change it too? Why do you think that this is all some scam to get advertising revenue? If you rely on search engine placement for traffic, you're accepting the risk that your placement might change.

doubtfully

[*weasel]

stocks move faster than that. Yahoo had announced its intention to split from Google for some time, and signalled it for much longer. (You don't retain your internal search companies, and buy more search IP if you intend to use a 3rd party forever).

Google however is finding a larger market in advertising than it thought it could, and despite your claim makes most of its profit from smaller private contracts.

Yahoo is just about the -only- large portal contract they had. I mean, who else is there? And it was far from their only revenue source.

Yes, when this split happens, it would depress their share price, but I doubt it signals a longterm marketability problem. This is Yahoo prepping their investors to believe the impending split is in -their- best interests - instead of signalling that Yahoo itself can no longer afford to own search companies and still pay for Google.

After all, it's Yahoo that has been in a business tailspin for the last few years. Not Google.

And this won't bother their prospective IPO, as the large financial institutions that would have first shot at IPO shares have analysts that have known this plan for some time.

Yahoo execs must play a lot of Risk.

[crazyhorse44]

You know how when you play risk... and you team up with one of your friends... you have to keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn't get too strong? If he gets too strong he might turn around and start pillaging your homeland... so you have to remain friends as long as possible and then pick the right moment to invade him... feigned disgust notwithstanding.

This is the same thing here... Yahoo teamed up with Google as long as the relationship was substantially beneficial to Yahoo. However... with Google's recent IPO... it is clear to the Yahoo suits that shareholders are going to want Google to "put out". This most likely would include a more full-figured search portal which would very likely ensure that Yahoo loses most of the armies it gets at the beginning of its turn and pretty eliminate any potential for new Risk cards. So Yahoo decided to screw Google first and try to solidify their position as the premier search portal for all the web refuse that isn't already part of the AOL empire.

Re:Word to Yahoo! (and Google, too)

[rseuhs]

Keep the "open this search result in a new window" link when you do; it's the major reason I search (nearly) exclusively with Yahoo! and almost rarely use plain Google.

With Mozilla [mozilla.org], you can open links in new windows (or tabs, whatever you like more) with a single click on the middle mouse button. Anytime on any webpage.

Not your father's Yahoo

[skidoo2]

Yahoo is not rocket science, and it sure ain't Google. And Yahoo probably (justifiably) doesn't want to pay Google prices for a feature that just doesn't matter that much to the great majority of their users. Because the great majority likely fall into two camps:

1. Too dumb to use anything EXCEPT whatever search engine they're spoon-fed by Yahoo.

2. Too smart to ever use ANYTHING spoon-fed to them by Yahoo.

I'm a Yahoo user. But even when they switched their search engine to Google, I still tracked over to google.com for all my searching. Google has created a *tres chic* brand, and Yahoo can't appropriate that.

But on to my main point....

Have you people even been to yahoo.com in the past few years?! Suggesting that full-text web searching is somehow a critical Yahoo feature is just silly. Only the most technologically myopic of grandmas and carpenter uncles actually searches with Yahoo.

Yahoo excels at being a ==PORTAL==. My personalized Yahoo page is very convenient. CLICK->categorized personalized mainstream news, weather, basic calendaring, etc.->scan, scroll, scan, scroll->sip coffee->CLICK->on to /. [www.slashdotorg], then fark [fark.com], then memepool [memepool.com], etc.

Yes. But...

[alib001]

Refining searches using the "-" modifier is a good way to cut down on noise but Google imposes a limit of ten words.

Which is a pity because to weed out the guff in a lot of the searches I perform there are about four or five terms I routinely exclude meaning that what I can actually search for is limited (especially when I then find it necessary to refine and thus exclude more words).

It'd be nice if they offered to exclude lists of words according to type of search e.g. !commercial excludes "cheap"; "shopping basket"; "purchase"; "products" etc.