What happened to Yahoo?

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cube_b3
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What happened to Yahoo?

Post by cube_b3 »

I don't think it is as popular as it was back in the day.

How did Google take over, is it because Yahoo grew too much and the search engine basically showed results with in the Yahoo Network only i.e Yahoo Movies, Yahoo Weather, Yahoo News etc, etc.

I still like to use Yahoo as a search engine every now and then (mainly for their dictionary), but it is a lot easier to google things by typing google.

Was google always a synonym for search or did we make it into one.
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Re: What happened to Yahoo?

Post by Zealous zerotype »

Not to get too crazy indepth, but Yahoo has made some poor business decisions. They have made some horrendous mistakes when it comes to brand recognition IMO. IIRC, just recently they have made strides in correcting this such as putting yahoo next to flickr etc... Google just had a better search engine and actually powered yahoo for a while which helped both companies, but obviously google more so. Yahoo does alright now, but just with a different crowd. Their gossip sections/celebrity bullshit is actually really popular, but that is not in most/if any of our interest/were not the target demographic.
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Re: What happened to Yahoo?

Post by Jeeba Jabba »

cube_b3 wrote: Was google always a synonym for search or did we make it into one.

The term "google" was coined in the year 1212 A.D. by the Roman Catholic Church in the event of the lost "Children's Crusade." It came into use during the search (synonymous with google) for the lost in what is modern-day Tunisia.
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Re: What happened to Yahoo?

Post by Specially Cork »

What personally turned me off Yahoo was this huge mess of a "portal" homepage it turned into. Going to www.yahoo.com today, it's still the same. I have no idea what they're trying to be, and I doubt they do any of it very well.
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Re: What happened to Yahoo?

Post by cube_b3 »

Yeah that's what I thought.

They added to much to the homepage which turned visitors off, however slowly and gradually google is heading the same way.
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Re: What happened to Yahoo?

Post by melancholy »

It also helped that Google went on to make some of the best pieces of technology in the world that helped drive its popularity.
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Re: What happened to Yahoo?

Post by Juan »

Google buys shits.
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Re: What happened to Yahoo?

Post by Code-Red »

Yahoo has been a poor search engine for the longest time. The reason no one noticed ( or knew better) is because their search engine algorithms were fundamentally similar to others such as Lycos, Altavista, and so fourth. You'd search for something and instead of getting proper and popular results, you got every single site that related to your search with no rank of importance. When you got the results, you'd end up having to crawl the search pages for what you wanted. Google on the other hand filters and ranks the results. You usually get what you want within the first page.

It didn't help, as Boney mentioned, that search engines were loaded up with portals, images, and crap. Googles simplicity is key. If people want news, they know where to get news. If people want JUST the search engine, Google is where its at.
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Re: What happened to Yahoo?

Post by Quzar »

The biggest thing Google introduced was its AdWords advertising system for profit generation. Older search engines had to use standard-y banner ads and have huge content systems to make these ads work.

With AdWords, Google doesn't have to contribute any content to the internet itself, it just puts a little box around some search results. Extremely unobtrusive. Not only that, but the targeted nature of these ads makes them *much* more effective and thus expensive than other ad systems.
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Re: What happened to Yahoo?

Post by pixel »

The difference, for me, was when I received my beta invite for Gmail. Once I made the switch from Yahoo! Mail, my fate was sealed. As of right now, I have only used 13% of available space and I've never deleted an email. While I had one gigabyte of space for my Gmail account, Yahoo! increased their size to a paltry 100 megabytes (or 1/10th the size). After 6 years of using Gmail as a primary email, I've only reached 990 megabytes of email, which is still just under the original space of my inbox. Oh, and my inbox size has been increasing since I opened the account, to 7,567 megabytes currently.

Also, the ease and scalability of Google Apps for small businesses/organizations is awe-inspiring and overlooked. A complete intranet with custom domain emails for free? That still blows me away.

EDIT: I just read that Yahoo! Mail inboxes have unlimited space. That's cool, but it's too late now for me to switch.
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Re: What happened to Yahoo?

Post by Ex-Cyber »

Yahoo was not originally a search engine, it was an index. People submitted their site, someone reviewed the submission, and then it got listed in some category. And of course the submitter could pay for expedited review. Once the web became too big for that to work well, Yahoo's fate was sealed.
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Re: What happened to Yahoo?

Post by Specially Cork »

Interestingly, I'd say a notable percentage of my Google searches are satisfied with a Yahoo Answers result.
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Re: What happened to Yahoo?

Post by Jeeba Jabba »

BoneyCork wrote:Interestingly, I'd say a notable percentage of my Google searches are satisfied with a Yahoo Answers result.

Yeah, Yahoo Answers is the shit.
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Re: What happened to Yahoo?

Post by Luriden »

Jeeba Jabba wrote:
BoneyCork wrote:Interestingly, I'd say a notable percentage of my Google searches are satisfied with a Yahoo Answers result.

Yeah, Yahoo Answers is the shit.
I don't think I've ever gotten a real "answer" from reading Yahoo Answers, but it's great for laughs. If any sort of IQ test was required of anyone who posts an answer there, that site would serve no purpose.
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Re: What happened to Yahoo?

Post by DanteJay »

Luriden wrote: I don't think I've ever gotten a real "answer" from reading Yahoo Answers, but it's great for laughs.
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