A sad story of an Internet Search Giant | Hacker News Reader

A sad story of an Internet Search Giant

blog.jitbit.com

69 pointsjitbit28 comments

It's hard to agree that Yahoo has "collapsed," when it's the 4th most visited website in the world.

I think the point being made is that as a business it has collapsed. Just having mind- or browser-share isn't the only metric of whether or not a business is thriving (or collapsing)

Here, I'd like to quote one of my friends' opinion: Google, right now, is driven by fear, not by vision. This fear-driven development (FDD... :-D ), is not a good sign. I don't know whether it's because when the organization exceeds certain size, this must happen or there are other reasons behind it, but I do believe that, when exceeds some limit, innovative and creative idea lost the best environment to grow, unless you try to keep the organization at a reasonable scale.

I think what the HN comments are missing is the tech blogs only care about what people have done for us lately. IE people say Yahoo is collapsing because it seems like their potential for innovation is gone, and instead they're moving into patent trolling. Microsoft was the same way in 2007, but with Metro, now bloggers are giving them a shot again.

Google isn't over, but it's unclear if the company's innovative spirit remains.

Is anyone actually comparing the bells and whistles on yahoo.com to the ones on google.com? The sites are like night and day.

Who said the post is about Google? =) But you're right. Hopefully, Google learned the lesson...

Would you stop visiting Google if it had a homepage full of news?

Having a sparse homepage is not the reason why Google is winning today, or why Yahoo lost.

I likely would stop visiting Google as frequently as I do.

The sparse homepage is one of the main reasons I switched to Google way back in the day.

Well no. I hardly ever visit Google homepage these days. Only time I do so is when my friends tell me there is an interesting Google doodle.

All my Google use is done with Firefox search bar.

>Would you stop visiting Google if it had a homepage full of news?

Yes, clutter = slow, slow = I wouldn't use it.

I can't actually remember the last time I saw the home page outside a screenshot, I just use the chrome url bar search, which is about the limit i can currently imagine for a sparse search interface.

Did Yahoo ever dominate basic search? Directory maybe but search?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altavista

Yep, Altavista. Before writing that blog post I verified all the facts at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Yahoo! (image hosting is Flickr, blog/social platform is Yahoo-360, other services include Yahoo Groups, Yahoo messenger, GeoCities page hosting, Yahoo Mail, Overture (paid search ads) and other services.

But … wait. They didn't acquire Altavista until 2003, when it was already dead in the water.

yeah that's what I thought - it seems like they were fairly close to Yahoo before 2003 though ... providing their search results from 1996.

Yep, 2003, my bad... But Yahoo still dominated the search anyways. According to December 1999 stats they had 56% market share (while nearest competitor - Excite - had 11%, Google was <1%)

Yahoo! Groups was awesome. One of the best acquisitions they made. Originally written in Python in 1997.

I got connected with the net in 1995. At that time we used Yahoo extensively. We jumped to Altavista a year or so later mostly because it had larger index.

I used WebCrawler in the mid 1990's because it was based on search terms.

Then it steadily declined in quality and I started using Google, not because Google got better so much as because WebCrawler got worse.

It's a case of changing paradigms.

At the time of Yahoo's rise, the way users typically searched the internet (not the web) was gopher. And Yahoo's early approach (categories) was somewhat similar to that of gopher.

The term "internet search" meant something different in the 1990's than it does today.

No, never. This story is preposterous in the depths it trolls to try to compare Yahoo with Google. Yahoo was a ontologically sorted link graph. Years later, after AltaVista imploded, they picked it up, but to call them a search giant? Ridiculous.

It did. No the 80% but at the end of 1999 yahoo had 56% if the search market while google had <1%. Can't post a prooflink from the phone will do that later

I find this story hilarious because in its reach to setup Yahoo as a parable for Google, they actually describe exactly how Yahoo faltered -- Yahoo had their lunch eaten by Google as users found that hierarchically organized lists of links was usurped by text search: Why would I want to labour through hierarchies when I could just type my city and pita, for instance.

Yahoo later bought the collapsed remains of a failed AltaVista but it was too late. The web had pivoted away from what Yahoo was offering, and the company has been in decay mode since.

So if the lesson was that Google can't sit on their laurels, expecting the world to stay static, then I commend this article for its insight. But I suspect that wasn't the author's intention.

Uh, did you read the final quote? Give the author some credit, he knew exactly what he was paralleling.

I don't think Google is on a good path right now, but I would majorly hesitate to compare them to Yahoo. Yahoo has dawdled for years with no clear vision of what the hell they are doing. In fact, you could argue that Page's current strategy is a play against turning out like Yahoo. It's a pretty clear vision, even if I don't like it, and it's certainly product-oriented. They're focusing on one product and streamlining all the random crap they used to do just for the hell of it.

I don't know what will happen with Google, but I don't see Yahoo's fate in their future.

the tech-blogs' perception of google is so far off reality. google isn't loosing. google just entered a new market (social) which has a huge barrier of entry, thus they're fighting to get a foot in this door. within their traditional domain (search/advertising) they're unrivaled. all the "google is doomed" talk is based on the potential entry of facebook into the search market. however, this hasn't happened yet and if or whenever it should we'll see how that goes. until then, i'd like to not read the same shit over and over every day on hackernews.

The Google is doomed talk is as crazy as the Microsoft is doomed talk.

But honestly, I think you are missing the big picture. Search and social are no longer seen as two separate markets. If Google lags or fails are social, it could suffer in search. Much of the content which needs to be indexed (which is to say that people are looking for) is found in social networks, be that Twitter or Facebook.

On top of that, your account is 14 days old. Whining about reading "the same shit over and over every day on hackernews" is silly.

Much of the "Google is doomed" talk is based on the mere fact that Google is entering these new markets. Getting spread too thin is the fear. Google could focus just on being the best search engine it can possibly be but it's not doing that, it's trying to do dozens of other things too. Some of those things are innovative and cool (self-driving cars!) but other things seem like stupid me-too efforts (everything they've done so far in "social"). Nobody cares about "the potential entry of Facebook into the search market" - that would just be as big a warning sign for Facebook as Google+ is for Google.

Trying to do too many things at once is a good way to do them all badly.

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