As I understand it, Yahoo!, who went from getting beat up by Google to graveling at Google and Microsoft’s feet for a buy out has decided to do a management reshuffle.
They can’t do much worse that the bunch that is in there now.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Fantasy Sports. They are exceptionally run and I rely on Yahoo! Mail for its slick interface and its worth $19.99 per year to use the advanced features. But otherwise, I really have no use for Yahoo! as a company.
First, they dumped their Yahoo! Music service to Rhapsody, who gladly raised the price as soon as they took it over. Yahoo!’s search feature, that was once a free Directory listing then turned into a pay-for service (at $299 per year and that was no guarantee you’d be listed). Next, Yahoo! again dumped on their audience by adding Google search results into their mix as a search engine. Now all the people paying $299 for a directory listing were getting nowhere in searches. Yahoo! must have seen their drop in revenue related to this issue.
Then in 2004 they dumped Google from their service and started using their own search engine. Yahoo!’s spiders apparently drink a lot on the weekends and are slow and sluggish when they do make it back to work on Monday morning. It seems that Yahoo’s spiders will visit your site when they please, which is not the reliable month or so that Google does, in fact it could be never again. So if your site had an issue when spidered…be prepared to live with the consequences in Yahoo! for a while.
Oh, but Yahoo!’s solution is Yahoo! Search Submit Basic. With this feature, you get your site crawled within 4 days…if you pay them $49. They will spider up to 5 pages. This is an annual fee, by the way.
As I see it, all of this defensive management by Yahoo! has lead them to the brink. They are no longer an innovator, they are purely revenue focused. So, that is what they focus on while Google continues to dominate them 4 to 1.
Google has an incredible business model. They have all the good buzz still in their corner. They are forward looking and I think it will help them to continue to dominate companies like Yahoo! and Microsoft in the search market.
Just in reading some articles today about this shake-up, I see that “Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday at the company’s analyst day he wants to team up with the Yahoo to take on Google.” Team up all you want…while Google leads, you can try to tear them down. But as long as they keep providing innovation and value, it is going to be fun for them watching Yahoo! and Microsoft eat their dust.
Yes, fortunes may change in the future, but right now, Google is where the smart money is. Let’s hope Yahoo!’s management change will make their search service worth more than the spam delivery service it is becoming with pay-for (over honest businesses) search results.
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