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In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

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Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#61
post #31
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not been a good simple general directory since yahoo stopped being one. Search is one thing, structured reference is different. Though it is a much more difficult problem now and would need a completely different approach to achieve it.

Why would you want one? The Internet has become too big for a Table of Contents to make any sense anymore.

The universe is much bigger than the internet and reference encyclopedias are still useful and popular.

Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#62

So given all the hubbub lately I decided to visit Yahoo.com for the first time in years. I'm not really Yahoo's target audience, but my second-first impressions are: - That little "Make Yahoo! your homepage" thing that slides down and moves the rest of the content with it has got to go (especially considering there's a "Make Y! your homepage" link RIGHT below it). - Clicking on the dot in the exclamation point still…

Honestly, Yahoo today looks less 'clean' than AOL and abous as bad as Fox News.

I am not impressed.

Okay, I may not be the target visitor. But I think that my design aesthetic (minimalistic, simple, low-clutter) is not uncommon, even among non-geeks.

Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#63

So given all the hubbub lately I decided to visit Yahoo.com for the first time in years. I'm not really Yahoo's target audience, but my second-first impressions are: - That little "Make Yahoo! your homepage" thing that slides down and moves the rest of the content with it has got to go (especially considering there's a "Make Y! your homepage" link RIGHT below it). - Clicking on the dot in the exclamation point still…

"there's SO MUCH STUFF on the front page"

I haven't been there for a long time, so I went there to follow your critique, and my first thought was WTF is all this? This is like a 90s site map, with pictures.

Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#64

One strategy for Yahoo: Turn Google's strengths into weaknesses by opening up all of Yahoo's products (Search, Mail, Finance, Maps, Sports, News) to developers to be maximally programmable. Allow developers to monetize in any way they feel like (aside from fraud) and let them link together apps in creative mashups. This links together YQL, Yahoo Pipes, YUI, BOSS, and several other existing Yahoo technologies into Yah…

Turn Google's strengths into weaknesses by opening up all of Yahoo's products (Search, Mail, Finance, Maps, Sports, News) to developers to be maximally programmable.

This sounds great, in a handwavy way. In practice though I'd like to hear specifics about what Yahoo could/would offer that Google doesn't already?

Search: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview

Mail: https://developers.google.com/google-apps/gmail/

Maps: Seriously? I'm not even going to bother linking to the Google Maps API

Google doesn't have great developer stories in Finance, Sports or News. I guess there are some opportunities there, but exactly what they are isn't obvious.

Anyway, isn't this whole strategy what Yahoo tried in the 2006-09 timeframe? It failed then (mostly by failing to bring in revenue) - why would it be different now?

Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#66
post #53
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Yahoo is hiring like crazy.

Any areas in particular?

Pretty much everywhere, but I know for a fact front-end (HTML/CSS/JS) is in high-demand. Just search for relevant terms on the careers site.

Also, Flickr is hiring -> http://flickr.com/jobs/

Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#68
post #58

I think it's obvious that Yahoo! needs some serious internal "disruption." I think the biggest thing they need is relevance . Incremental improvements to their search, email, etc I don't think will matter. If Yahoo's search started being 5% better than Google, by whatever metric you prefer, would anyone really care? I would still use Google. I think in many consumer's view, and even probably many of us, we have all j…

> Incremental improvements to their search, email, etc I don't think will matter. If Yahoo's search started being 5% better than Google, by whatever metric you prefer, would anyone really care? I would still use Google. Yup, that's the issue. I actually tried Bing on a search this week - I was pretty surprised to see it returned better results, faster, than Google. But I still use Google like everyone else. Google ow…

Bing is still missing some ridiculously elementary features, like Google's "Past week" / "Past 24 hours" / "Past hour" menu. When I look up an error message, I don't want to see what caused it 3 years ago in an obsolete version of my OS.

Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#69
post #63

So given all the hubbub lately I decided to visit Yahoo.com for the first time in years. I'm not really Yahoo's target audience, but my second-first impressions are: - That little "Make Yahoo! your homepage" thing that slides down and moves the rest of the content with it has got to go (especially considering there's a "Make Y! your homepage" link RIGHT below it). - Clicking on the dot in the exclamation point still…

"there's SO MUCH STUFF on the front page" I haven't been there for a long time, so I went there to follow your critique, and my first thought was WTF is all this? This is like a 90s site map, with pictures.

Wow, it's horrible.

The way the logo is placed, it looks like an ad for another site.

The whole page is reminiscent of the adwords aggregation sites that grab the mis-typed domains of popular sites.

Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#70
post #55
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record, Mozilla is a 501(c)(3).

That is the Mozilla Foundation. There is also the for-profit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

"The Mozilla Corporation was established on August 3, 2005 to handle the revenue-related operations of the Mozilla Foundation. As a non-profit, the Mozilla Foundation is limited in terms of the types and amounts of revenue."

The for-profit Mozilla Corporation only exists for tax purposes, and is wholly owned and controlled by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation.

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