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Yahoo is Number One in So Much More Than Search

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

#41

Post by jdrock »

jdrock wrote: post #37
jacquesm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's extremely interesting. Thank you! The funny thing is while coding that stuff the bigger problems were financial and the enormous amount of cruft that is the web. The actual search engine wasn't that hard at all.

Yep - that's exactly it. Setting up the infrastructure to handle large, web-scale content analysis is the real challenge. (Shameless plug alert) That's why we setup 80legs: to help everyone not called Google/Yahoo/Microsoft to have comparable capabilities when it comes to this.

Right now we crawl again for each user, but as we scale up we're going to start doing some caching and providing data streams.

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

#42

Post by w1ntermute »

jsonscripter wrote: post #25
sha90 wrote: post #3

Yahoo has been my homepage since '96. I'm oldschool.

Homepage? I don't even have a homepage, just whatever tabs I had open last time.

Same here, it's either that or 1 blank tab if I closed all my tabs last time.

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

#43

Post by IsaacSchlueter »

zmimon wrote: post #23
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…

I agree with you about the "not exciting" part, but I disagree about their reputation in geek circles - at least "real" geek circles and not just tech digerati that are obsessed only with what is changing and new and what drives traffic to their blog sites. Yahoo pump out loads of tech stuff all the time - YUI, Hadoop, YSlow, YUI Compressor are all hugely respected and popular tools. They've write articles and publis…

Don't forget YQL, the weather APIs, Pipes, and Flickr. I personally think BOSS was a bit mishandled, but it has really great potential, as does YAP/YOS.

Yahoo is one of the largest collection of professional web developers, and they take that seriously. Of course, their money is in Average Joe offerings like News and Frontpage.

I do work for them, and for a developer offering team too boot, so this is quite biased, of course ;)

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

#45

Post by litewulf »

jacquesm wrote: post #34
Keyframe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.80legs.com/ - jdrock, founder, is around here on HN

That's extremely interesting. Thank you! The funny thing is while coding that stuff the bigger problems were financial and the enormous amount of cruft that is the web. The actual search engine wasn't that hard at all.

(This intrigues me. I had imagined the long tail queries were really hard. I mean, the places where Google succeeds and Bing fails, or vice-versa seem to me the "gaps" where for whatever reason its difficult to get things right, be they for spam reasons or scoring difficulties.

Could you define "good"?)

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

#46

Post by treyp »

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'm surprised nobody else is a fan of Yahoo News. It might be faux pas to say this here, but I find Yahoo News to be a lot better than Google News, so I use Yahoo and NPR as my main news sources (NPR isn't something I can easily glance at, though). Google News seems to be a bit more random, and it doesn't really pick up the highest quality version of the stories.

I guess there's something that human editors (which Yahoo still uses for its news page) can do better than machines for now. At least, to me.

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

#48

Post by dotcoma »

shib71 wrote: post #8
dotcoma wrote: post #5

Yahoo! still sees itself as a "media company". Poor things.

Your patronising tone is a little silly. Newspapers may be dying out, but there will always be a place for "media companies". Few people are willing to depend on Twitter and the blogosphere for news, and Yahoo is one of the few companies that are successfully meeting the changing news needs.

I'm not necessarily against media companies such as newspapers. Actually, I hope at least a few really make it, or we're in trouble.

But Yahoo thinks they are a "media company" because they sell banners on Yahoo! Mail (...). And, frankly, I don't see them meeting the changing media needs...

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

#50

Post by newacc »

idlewords wrote: post #12
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.

i agree with you - Yahoo finance, Yahoo sports and Yahoo movies are very popular ... also one might be surprised that yahoo has huge loyal fans in asian countries like china, hongkong, singapore, india, indonesia etc.... people from these countries started their internet life with yahoo search and email services and they still use it, so yes, there are many yahoo properties that are undoubtedly leading the competition...
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