Search War '04: Yahoo To Drop Google As Primary Search Tech

[Waluigi]

Source

Yahoo Gets Set to Give Google Run for Money

Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) (NasdaqNM:YHOO - News) once was the unquestioned first choice for help in navigating the Internet. Then it lost that distinction to Google Inc.'s powerful search technology. Now, Yahoo is plotting to recapture the hearts and mice of Web users with a three-pronged assault on Google's dominance, Tuesday's Wall Street Journal reported.
First, Yahoo is expected to dump Google as the primary search technology on its site within a few months, a move that could come around the time Google is preparing a long-awaited initial stock offering. Some marketing firms, which help advertisers manage their online campaigns for search-related ads, say they have been told Yahoo will switch from Google to its own technology as early as the first quarter.

Second, Yahoo wants to combine personalization and customization features to extend the usefulness of searches. Third, it plans to expand its use of "paid inclusion," whereby it frequently surveys a participating merchant's sites for the most up-to-date information and includes those findings in users' search results. Merchants pay Yahoo from 15 cents to more than $1 when visitors click on a link for that merchant.

The strategy isn't simply to match what Google does now but to add features its rival can't easily match.

Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., Yahoo incorporated in 1995 as a kind of Yellow Pages directory of the Internet, using employees who manually categorized Web pages. But it has always relied on technology from others for automated Web searches. Since 2000, that technology has come from Google.

Yahoo now views Google more as rival than ally, a contender for the lucrative ad revenue that comes from targeting ads at the moment people are looking for something. Yahoo spent more than $2 billion last year buying Overture Services Inc. and Inktomi Corp. to buttress its in-house search technology. And now it is beginning to roll out offerings stemming from those acquisitions, based on Overture's technology for selling "sponsored," or paid, search results, as well as Inktomi's technology for searching the Web.

Wall Street Journal Staff Reporter Mylene Mangalindan contributed to this report.

--Waluigi

 

[MrMacMan]

Yeah apparently Microsoft wants to attack Google Too...

I think that Google is simple enough to work.

 

[wdlove]

Google has it's prominent place in Safari. It is the one and only Searcch engine that I use, have it as a bookmark in my IE on OS 9.

 

[hulugu]

Yeah I used Yahoo

Back in the day in '95, but now I wouldn't go back.
Yahoo bugs me, their free email provides much of the Spam I get at work (although at home I never see because of the Junk filter in Mail), their website is ugly and I've never been satisfied with their results.
And Microsoft—oh sweet! Yet another thing they can do half-assed, and thanks again for having such an original thought. MSN's search results are always flawed and are way too dependent on advertisers, I don't trust the results. Slashdot has pointed out many times that MSN searches for Linux yield bizarre and contradictory results.
I'll say with Google, it works in Safari at home and under Mozilla at work.

 

[virividox]

google is cool!!! besides yahoo cant do the image return

 

[eyelikeart]

I still use Yahoo! for simple searches. I tend to go toward Google more when I have something more obscure to find, or for the image search.

I'm damned interested in this stock offering from Google though. I just emailed my broker to find out if it's worth jumping on.

 

[arby]

Google results fluctuate an awful lot - in November they introduced a filter which removes sites which are over optimized in their eyes. eg. www.keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.com.

It's got rid of a lot of the bad sites in really popular searches for hotels, travel, holidays flights etc, but it has also removed fully legitimate sites and put them out of business.

I like AlltheWeb.com, similar to Google but much more customizable.