scott.hodson.blog

With recent articles about how Google is evil or how Google is the new Microsoft, over-leveraging their powerful position in the web and its hoardes of current and soon-to-come cash, it makes me wonder about poor old Yahoo. Afterall, they were the first web site I went to when I was using Mosaic 1.0 in 1993, running on my Sparc workstation in my lab/office at BYU and in the menu of Mosaic there was a menu item called “Cool Sites” or something like that which would take you directly to Yahoo’s page, which used to be just a page of links since there were so few websites then.

So before you start wondering if Yahoo is the next AltaVista (which used to be the best search engine), don’t worry. With some smart acquisitions like Overture and Inktomi, minus Broadcast.com (thanks for creating the ego-maniacal monster that is Mark Cuban), they have some pretty smart people on-board. And I’ve seen several job postings on user group mailing lists, Craigslist, etc. by Google down here in Southern California, both for their Pasadena (Overture, GoTo) office and their newer Santa Monica office which I think deals more with their forays into media and entertainment. This strength in hiring and acquisition shows that they are taking a very aggresive and bullish stance on shaping their future.

I later heard a rumor on Leo Leporte’s podcast (episode #19) that Google engineers had said that Yahoo’s search engine is more accurate than Google’s. I couldn’t find any such report on the web, so it’s just a rumor, but it prompted me to give Yahoo’s search engine another look. Visually, it was disturbing, not because it was poorly designed, but because it wasn’t Google, which I’ve become so accustomed to. I was surprised by the amount of resistance I gave it solely on look and feel, and realized that switching search engines may be more difficult than people think. Eventually, I overcame the UI resistance and I started using Yahoo for search throughout the day, comparing them with Google’s results, and I was noticing that I actually was getting better results on what I was looking for than at Google! I’ve even changed the default search engine in Firefox from Google to Yahoo…a big step.

So my advice? While everybody talks about Microsoft and Google duking it out for the future of computing, Yahoo may be the sleeper play in all of this. Also, give Yahoo’s search a try out next time you do a search, and give it some time to get used to it if you’ve been a long-time Google user.

<disclaimer>I do not own any Yahoo or Google stock, nor am I shorting Google’s stock either</disclaimer>