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Yahoo now has more images indexed than Google. Some folks estimate that Yahoo now has 5 billion web documents indexed, comparable to the 5 billion estimated to be indexed by Google excluding the supplementals in their 8 billion figure, and exceeding estimates of what MSN Search really has for searchable documents.
Many folks, myself included, are finding Yahoo SERPs relevant and free of much of the spam infesting Google, on subjects from relativity to fine arts.
MSN launches a new search Feb 1, amid much fan-fare, and hardly anyone seems to notice or care. Google stumbles in February with an oddity called Allegra and gets all the attention. Meanwhile, Yahoo quietly moves forward on multiple fronts and continues to impress. Is the future threat to Google dominance and #1 position really going to be Yahoo/Inktomi and NOT Microsoft as so many assume? :)
MSN launches a new search Feb 1, amid much fan-fare, and hardly anyone seems to notice or care.
There's been quite a fuss about MSN around here. MSN doesn't generate news as well as Google, Yahoo, or the king of marketing, Ask Jeeves. So maybe generating fake news like "independent" research and prognostications is something MSN should work on so that forum people can talk about it like something was really happening.
Nevertheless, there is meaning in the lack of chatter.
Google stumbles in February with an oddity called Allegra and gets all the attention.
Google twitches and gets more attention than anyone else. Is that a measure of how important they are, or merely how many people follow them?
Is the future threat to Google dominance and #1 position really going to be Yahoo/Inktomi and NOT Microsoft as so many assume?
Yahoo is innovating at a fast pace and taking their own path, apart from Google's path, to providing what they feel users want. So the question might be, will Google be able to respond to the changing user base and give them what they want? Google offers amazing technologies, but the blank slate home page- how long can they keep that up before a generation grows up and finds it boring?
Remains to be seen whether Yahoo's tightly integrated suite of tools will appeal to users more than Google's loosely connected set of tools. One thing's for certain, this race is tightening up.
[edited by: martinibuster at 8:16 pm (utc) on Mar. 1, 2005]
Strange if you see what Yahoo paid for several web properties and what fraction of that money could have been spent on translating the basic Yahoo search into other languages.
Oh yes, those form letters are so helpful...
Queen of Search...
[dk.search.yahoo.com...]
[no.search.yahoo.com...]
[se.search.yahoo.com...]
it even has news search. Cool imho.
[Apparently they don't post a transcript online on the CR website, or I just can't find it.]
Charlie Rose asked Yang about the battle for top billing in the search world between Google, MSN, and Yahoo!
Yang gave an interesting answer. If I understood him correctly, he said that he sees the future as these three outfits offering really three very different products based on their individual views of what searchers want.
It sounded like Yahoo! was headed in the direction of extensive personalization of search, including "intelligent search". That sounded like Yahoo! would "learn" a searchers patterns and preferences and provide serps accordingly.
But then maybe I misunderstood.
Is that a measure of how important they are, or merely how many people follow them?
isnt that the same thing?
No. Popularity and importance are not the same thing. The herd, I mean the crowd, is often mistaken.
For instance, The Velvet Underground released one of the more important albums of the early 1970's (The Velvet Underground & Nico) but it didn't go anywhere and was quite unpopular. Part of the problem was that they released the album in 1967. hehe. Yet that album, and the scene created around them, came to define a part of the seventies that filtered down to mainstream culture much later on. It was important, but not popular.
While the number one song according to Billboard Magazine for 1977 may have been You Light Up my Life by Debbie Boone, seminal bands like the Sex Pistols and Joy Division were forming and defining what the music of the next twenty five years would sound like. While not popular in their day, they were far more important in the world of music than Debbie Boone.
Yahoo is pursuing a strategy of being useful to their users, and doing so in a very flexible modular environment called My Yahoo. The horse isn't across the finish line but it sure looks like a winner to me. Even though the Yahoo forum is currently not as popular as the Google forum, that does not diminish Yahoo's importance. So perhaps the viewpoint depends on whether you are looking at it from the perspective of a leader or a follower.
id have to say im not sure how many people will judge Google important by whether the search they do today looks good in 20 years. You'd haave to think important for a search engine is whether it meets your needs at the point of use. When people here talk about important i think they think about the amount of traffic it can provide for their website. Again that would be here and now.
Not bragging, just the facts, I've dominated a major keyword in top 10 ten results on many search engines for many years now and Yahoo and Ask/Teoma used to send statistically significant amounts of traffic to my site.
Then Google came along.
I'm still #3 on Yahoo and #1 on Ask/Teoma, yet 3% of my total site traffic (9,000 visitors) are people clicking my listing for that keyword from Google where I slid to #11 a few months ago. So, if Yahoo's #3 listing can't produce as much or more traffic than a #11 position on Google, they must be doing something very wrong.
martinibuster: While I agree with much of what you say, I will take issue with "There's been quite a fuss about MSN around here." My post clearly referenced the Feb 1 date, and any fair reading of MSN forum activity thereafter is that it was basically moribund. A lot of activity before the "official" launch, but more like a deflating balloon thereafter. I concur with the last two paragraphs of msg #2.
I think people would take Yahoo search more seriously if they got rid of all the schwag on their home page.
Yahoo as a portal has a greater base of users daily than anybody else on the web. It provides better user services than Google. If Google thought that Yahoo was not worth worrying about, why is it moving more and more toward alternative services outside of pure search.
Google see value in the kind of thing that Yahoo do and (I would suggest) feel threatened by it. I think we should definately take notice too.
He does however achieve good rankings in Yahoo consistantly. He informs his clients that Yahoo is becoming 'the' search engine to direct more energy because big G is on the slippery slope.
Clients take this 'advice' on board and begins to use Yahoo instead of Google...and tells his friends.
Soon the word gets around and the smoke turns into fire.
if you are a schisophrene at the fisrt stadium of the illness you look normal but someday you kill a few duzins then they realise whow sick you where and they put you on the white cloth.
