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In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

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Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#121

Post by mkl »

velodrome wrote: post #111
mkl wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curiously enough, the http://nz.yahoo.com page I got redirected to looks quite different and avoids many of the issues you point out.

The old Yahoo (US) page use to look like this. There may be a reason behind this. Maybe it is less bandwidth intensive (metered ISPs?).

Interesting, could be. Certainly most internet plans in New Zealand have a bandwidth cap, since all the traffic comes through very long expensive cables. That means round trips are slow too, which might be more relevant. Still does't explain a lot of things though.

Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#122

Post by antidoh »

jlarocco wrote: post #81
ramanujan wrote: post #42

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…

I don't see the connection you're making with GitHub. Whatever it may be, I'd prefer if Yahoo stays away. I'm against it enough that I would move my paid GitHub account to BitBucket. I understand they're trying to change their reputation, but I still remember how they killed Delicious and see how they've let Flickr bit rot. Let them practice not killing the software they buy before they buy another service I use.

Yes, please. I used Delicious but never liked it, it was merely closest to what I wanted.

Now I use pinboard, and I mostly like it.

I actually like Firefox, so please, leave it alone.

Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#123

Post by Bill_Dimm »

velodrome wrote: post #79
breckinloggins wrote: post #30

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…

I use Yahoo all the time. Here are my complaints (which many yahoo users always complain about in the comment section): -No consistency across sites -They censor a lot of the comments -The comment system never works right -The comment system constantly switches from facebook comments to yahoo comments. -A lot of the services don't work right (like retrieving portfolio data). Sometime it works, other times it does not…

I'll add some comments on their finance section:

1) REALLY need a way to graph "adjusted stock price" or "growth of $10,000" instead of just raw stock price. Otherwise, mutual fund graphs fall off a cliff every December due to payment of capital gains distributions and dividends (the drop is not economically meaningful and it makes it hard to compare to an index or other security). If you look at their "Historic Prices" page they have the data (called "Adj Close"), they just don't give you a way to graph it.

2) Since they started displaying real-time auto-updating stock prices recently, the percent change and dollar change are often out of sync (at least in my browser, Seamonkey). Sometimes, one is negative while the other is positive, so it's pretty obvious. I'm surprised the exchanges haven't slapped them silly for this (I believe you have to register with the exchanges if you are going to display their data to ensure that are competent enough to not display bad prices).

Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#124

Post by edanm »

ars wrote: post #84
powera wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The work week in Israel is Sunday through Thursday, so there probably were people in Yahoo! offices there.

Sunday in Israel was the 9th of Av, which is a very solemn fast day. I doubt if anything at all was open. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tisha_B%27Av

No, everything is mostly open on Sunday.

Saturday night, which is when the 9th of Av actually started, most (but not all) things were closed, but Sunday everything is open again, especially businesses.

Jewish Holidays go by the Hebrew Calendar, which counts days from Night to Night, not from Sunrise to Sunrise. So when the regular calendar says that the 9th of Av is on Sunday, the actual holiday is the evening of Saturday, then Sunday 'til evening.

Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#125

Post by fkdjs »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #101
pfedor wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Blekko also powered by Bing? It had the same result for hiybbprqag.

Actually no, we've got our own multi-billion page index, however we do farm out the long tail stuff (like hiybbpraqag :-). At some point I should get a blog post up about modern web indexes, its really fascinating to look at the relevance curves of the first few billion pages out to the first trillion page mark.

> hiybbpraqag

That just gets farmed out to google ;)

Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#126

Post by stevewilhelm »

bborud wrote: post #23
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #18

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…

I'll sum it up for you in one sentence: Marissa Mayer needs to figure out what Yahoo! is supposed to be good at. Right now Yahoo! isn't remarkably good at anything.

Just to name a few: on the consumer side, Yahoo! is remarkably good at Sports including Fantasy Football and Baseball, and on the technical side it's remarkably good at Hadoop.

Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#127

Post by jamesaguilar »

huhtenberg wrote: post #118
breckinloggins wrote: post #30

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…

Would you look at that? A "neat this, neat that, not too bad" review of a Yahoo homepage even though it's the exact same kaka as it was two weeks ago. Who would've thought that getting a notable ex-Googler on board would have a such immediate effect on swaying geeks in a pro-Yahoo direction? --- Of_Prometheus, you are hell-banned starting from this comment - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4268365

I doubt he'd get hell-banned for that. Maybe he deleted it? Or a dup account? But it doesn't seem like spammer activity so I'm guessing not.

Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#128

Post by ajays »

madrona wrote: post #112

Yahoo's front page is 600kb and finishes rendering after about a second. Google is 17kb, and renders in a tenth of that. More Googlification awaits.

Apples and oranges.

Try comparing http://search.yahoo.com/ with http://www.google.com/ , difference isn't as large.

Here's what I get:

     curl -s http://www.google.com/ | wc
     20     397   14433

     curl -s http://search.yahoo.com/ | wc
      1     363   12616

Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#129

Post by wamatt »

shykes wrote: post #71
wamatt wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting... Mozilla and Yahoo would make a good strategy, considering Google/Mozilla relationship has cooled in recent years. I like your Github/Meteor suggestion as well, albeit unlikely that either of those companies would take money or influence from Yahoo. Also don't think Marissa Mayer has the vision for these sort of changes, although hope I'm wrong on this.

Yahoo already has a real-time javascript framework of its own: http://developer.yahoo.com/cocktails/mojito/

Yeah.

The point was more about mindshare and not just tech.

"X has an image problem." where X can be any tech from an uncool company, even if it is fundamentally decent.

Re: In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo

#130

Post by zem »

rmason wrote: post #6

Looks like Marissa has learned the lesson told by Steve Blank in his famous essay, the elves leave middle earth http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-eart... It has bought her time with the engineers while she decides what to do.

great point made in the comments:

> But the point is that great engineers DON'T fight, they just move on. They aren't in the business of fixing companies, so they feel that anything that gets in the way of them creating is a huge waste of their time

i've definitely seen companies where management expected individual engineers to come forward and "fight for their rights" if they had a problem - if bob was slightly more willing to address things and noted that tom, dick and harry were unhappy with the new changes, the response would be "well, then, why haven't i heard anything from them about it?", and bob would thereafter be seen as a bit of a troublemaker. mind you, no one thought that tom, dick and harry were happy, just that they were undoubtedly willing to believe what the ceo said about "everyone having to make sacrifices" if someone like bob didn't come along and stir things up.

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