Is Yahoo Making a Comeback?

[phranque]

we know some people who are working at Yahoo, some for just a couple/few months now, but i haven't felt comfortable discussing anything until now.

Barry Schwarz (@rustybrick here and elsewhere) published an article this morning describing various aspects of Yahoo's recent activities regarding Yahoo Search:
Yahoo is making a return to search [searchengineland.com]

It seems like Yahoo Search wants to make a comeback in the near future.

Yahoo has been dropping hints over the past couple of weeks related to this return and is also hiring a Principal Product Manager for the Yahoo Search platform to help lead these initiatives.

including:
- a job posting for Principal Product Manager, Yahoo Search” in mid-January
- the reactivation of the @YahooSearch Twitter account and posting of hints and teasers
- LinkedIn posts by Yahoo senior executives regarding Yahoo Search positions
- a description of Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone's prior career as SVP, Product Management of Ask.com, then as SVP and GM (and then CEO) of Ask Jeeves; and then President and CEO of CBS Interactive, then CEO at Tinder

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

While those changes will certainly improve the Yahoo experience, they've positioned themselves in a shadow. Once leader, now follower. I hope they listen to their user base, it's their only lifeline. Alienate that and it's over for Yahoo.

edit: I just asked chatGPT to answer the title question, it agrees with me in a way. "It's difficult to say. While Yahoo still has a significant user base and offers various services, it has faced significant competition from other tech companies in recent years."

[phranque]

ChatGPT knows nothing about what has happened at Yahoo in the past 6 months.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

ChatGPT knows nothing about what has happened at Yahoo in the past 6 months.

More like a year, and Yahoo search results are powered by Bing. What are they going to do, tweak some CSS and call it all new?

[phranque]

Yahoo search results are powered by Bing. What are they going to do, tweak some CSS and call it all new?

i guess we will find out soon enough.
if changes are limited to stylesheet tweakage i would assume nobody will notice.

[tangor]

Well... yahoo has never gone away, but coming back to the lime light would be something new!

[mack]

I would be extremely difficult for Yahoo to make any real comeback unless they are preparing something very novel and new. Simply tweaking their CSS won't cut it. They do however have an opportunity to possibly dig into Google's lion-share of the search market if (more like when) Google scrambles to try and present users with something similar to ChatGPT.

We need to remember the relationship between Bing and Yahoo. MS is hugely invested in OpenAi. If Yahoo is able to deploy a very unique user experience using data derived from Bing they might be able to position themselves better in the search space.

It would also be very much in Bing's favour to see their results being distributed by a partner like Yahoo.

Mack.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

That was short-lived. Yahoo is about to lay off 1/5th of its workforce.

[phranque]

perhaps they are laying off all the useless the CSS tweakers.