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Yahoo is Number One in So Much More Than Search

nytimes.com

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Re: Yahoo is Number One in So Much More Than Search

#11

Post by davidw »

jacquesm wrote: post #2

I honestly can't remember the last time I even used Yahoo. Am I alone in this or is this common ?

I use their more open API's for langpop.com and other stuff where a search API is handy.

I also use my.yahoo.com, I still like it more than google's iGoogle. Especially as I don't want the overhead of loading iGoogle every time I hit google.com, where I just want to search.

Yeah, flickr, too, although sooner or later I'm going to get around to putting up my own gallery thing for my pictures. I'm paying for hosting anyway, might as well use it.

Re: Yahoo is Number One in So Much More Than Search

#12

Post by idlewords »

jacquesm wrote: post #2

I honestly can't remember the last time I even used Yahoo. Am I alone in this or is this common ?

The kind of people who read Hacker News are very, very unrepresentative of the canonical Yahoo user. The real page views and money come from sites like Yahoo Sports, the home page, games, personals - destination sites intended for the average Jane or Joe. Yahoo serves that audience well, even though they do many other things terribly.

Re: Yahoo is Number One in So Much More Than Search

#13

Post by BearOfNH »

jacquesm wrote: post #2

I honestly can't remember the last time I even used Yahoo. Am I alone in this or is this common ?

I use Yahoo finance many times daily, much more often than Google finance or other sites. Yahoo offers real-time update of broad market indices and delayed update of my favorite stocks on their main page, along with headlines and videos of the top business stories. It's a nice information packaging job.

Of course my broker supplies all that data and more, but they don't understand the complexities of corporate firewalls and http tunneling. Not to mention information stovepiping -- you know, one page for news, a separate page for quotes, another page for charts ... Yahoo integrates all that for free.

Re: Yahoo is Number One in So Much More Than Search

#14

Post by jimmybot »

Maybe I'm a little to obsessive with the original source thing... I was going to complain again about the link being nytimes.com instead of the original from gigaom.com

(From the guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter." )

But then this really leapt out at me:

"Yahoo News is the No. 1 news and information site in the country, with more than 50 million monthly unique readers, ahead of The New York Times network’s 45 million."

Wow, that says as much about The New York Times as it does about Yahoo News. Does the broad readership of the NYT surprise anyone else?

The New York Times certainly was big 15 years ago and by some measures, the number one paper by reputation, but no where near this big. A few things that made me really surprised at 45 million:

1) Like all the other newspapers, it suddenly needs a new business model. Isn't everyone going to blogs, aggregators, and their niche sources for their news? I know part of this is the inability to monetize the online readership in the same way as their traditional readership, but still.

2) NYT is written at a fairly sophisticated level and its liberal slant doesn't really appeal to a lot of people. Its understandable obsession with its hometown, New York City, both draws, but also repels a lot of people.

3) Hey, what 'bout CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc? Those seem much more generally appealing than the NYT.

Thoughts?

Re: Yahoo is Number One in So Much More Than Search

#15

Post by duncanj »

jacquesm wrote: post #2

I honestly can't remember the last time I even used Yahoo. Am I alone in this or is this common ?

I stopped yahooing after I was signed up to hotjobs through a newspaper and there was no interface for unsubcribing to their spam. So I canceled yahoo whole hog and haven't missed it.

Re: Yahoo is Number One in So Much More Than Search

#16

Post by GeneralMaximus »

Yahoo! has lost its reputation within geek circles. Google have not only put out really great products, they also go to great lengths to boast about their vastly superior technologies (BigTable, MapReduce), which gets them a lot of (well-deserved) geek love. Then there are Android and Chrome (with V8), both of which are pretty exciting to hackers. Also, Summer of Code, Code Jam etc. get Google a lot of street cred.

So, from a tech standpoint, Yahoo! isn't very exciting. They're still the same old portal website from the 90's. But for the average guy, Yahoo! still gives him what he needs, when he needs it. Non-tech people don't like to hop from one place to another.

I haven't been to any of Yahoo!'s services for over an year now, but that doesn't mean they're irrelevant.

Re: Yahoo is Number One in So Much More Than Search

#17

Post by DannoHung »

jimmybot wrote: post #14

Maybe I'm a little to obsessive with the original source thing... I was going to complain again about the link being nytimes.com instead of the original from gigaom.com (From the guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter." ) But then this really leapt out at me: "Yahoo News is the No. 1 news and information site in the country, wi…

> 2) NYT is written at a fairly sophisticated level and its liberal slant doesn't really appeal to a lot of people. Its understandable obsession with its hometown, New York City, both draws, but also repels a lot of people.

About half the country has voted Democrat in the last three Presidential elections. The Congress is now >50% Democrat as well.

Conservative voices are just the loudest and most annoying.

Re: Yahoo is Number One in So Much More Than Search

#18

Post by simonw »

GeneralMaximus wrote: post #16

Yahoo! has lost its reputation within geek circles. Google have not only put out really great products, they also go to great lengths to boast about their vastly superior technologies (BigTable, MapReduce), which gets them a lot of (well-deserved) geek love. Then there are Android and Chrome (with V8), both of which are pretty exciting to hackers. Also, Summer of Code, Code Jam etc. get Google a lot of street cred. S…

Hadoop is essentially a Yahoo! project, and has serious cred in geek circles.

Re: Yahoo is Number One in So Much More Than Search

#20

Post by smikhanov »

BearOfNH wrote: post #13
jacquesm wrote: post #2

I honestly can't remember the last time I even used Yahoo. Am I alone in this or is this common ?

I use Yahoo finance many times daily, much more often than Google finance or other sites. Yahoo offers real-time update of broad market indices and delayed update of my favorite stocks on their main page, along with headlines and videos of the top business stories. It's a nice information packaging job. Of course my broker supplies all that data and more, but they don't understand the complexities of corporate firewa…

I used Google Finance when I needed to check out some stocks (twice a year or so) just because googling "GOOG", "MSFT" or "AAPL" shows a link there. Original article mentions 20M uniques for Yahoo Finance; I looked on Crunchbase for Google Finance figures -- it's mere (in comparison with YF) 1M. Surprising.
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