Ask HN: How would you save Yahoo and bring it back to top place ?

Damn it! 8 minutes too late!

A lot of Yahoo!'s traffic is from older people. I'd capitalize on that by creating a social networking site that appealed to that demographic -- sort of like Classmates.com in that it would have an emphasis on nostalgia, but with the features of a Facebook-esque social networking site. (Also, no sleazy banner ads like Classmates.com has. Those ruin the brand for people outside the target demographic.) The plan would be to grab seniors like Facebook grabbed college students, then spread to the general population, like Facebook did.

It's probably unorthodox to expect a site to spread from older to younger people, rather than the other way around, but parents and grandparents have badgering power. If grandma really wants you to get a Yahoo! account so she can keep in touch, there's a good chance you'll at least humor her and get an account. Then you'll notice a lot of your friends have accounts too and add them (because hey, why not?). If the site does a good job of appealing to younger people as well as older people (it's important to strike a good balance), maybe you'll stick around.

I don't know anything firsthand about Yahoo!'s internals, but from another HN thread, it looks like they're probably bloated with counter-productive people. Fixing that in the long term would be important, but probably isn't possible in the short term; Yahoo!'s corporate structure may suck, but it keeps things running, and that's important. In the short term, though, it would be crucial to ensure that the team working on the social network was as unburdened as possible by the existing corporate structure.

I'd start with Yahoo Stores. PG, RTM, and Trevor Blackwell's creation was cutting-edge in 1996 but the web has changed a lot since then and Yahoo Stores hasn't. The store editor would proabably still work with Netscape 3, it's so non-web-2.0-ish. Even so, a lot of businesses still use it, but that number is probably shrinking.

With Yahoo Stores up-to-date I would try to position Yahoo as a small-to-medium business portal. It's a lucrative market and the competition isn't what it could be (despite the success of Sales Force, Magento, et al).

This would be, or seem to be, a big risk to current revenue, but unless they are bold enough to do that it's going to fade away in time anyway.

Actually motivating the middle management at Yahoo to do this would be tough. Perhaps it's time to simplify the management layer and give technical people more responsibility.

1) A unified, coherent design language and user experience for the site. This would really make Yahoo stand out, as even Google is clunky with this ("more" and "even more"). As it stands currently, it's too visually cluttered and hard to navigate. Example: I used to use Babelfish a lot, but trying to browse to it from the front page is well-nigh impossible. Another thought: sort the list of Yahoo sub-sites by popularity instead of alphabetically. It's fine to have umpty million different sub-sites, but they need to be coherently organized and findable. Yahoo really needs a first-class UI, even more than Google or Bing do, because Yahoo actually is a portal, and a portal is different things to different people. It needs to be cleanly navigable and this includes cleaning up the 1990s looking My Yahoo.

2) Back to basics: search. As soon as possible, get rid of the Bing mess and get back to being a premier search provider. Type nearly any topic into any search engine and you get a Wikipedia page first thing. If I type "hacker" into Yahoo, out of the top ten results, there are five junky results: 2 Wikipedia pages, one Answers.com page, one Dictionary.com page, and one WordIQ page. If I want to get a definition or an encyclopedia page, I can go to those sites. Web search is supposed to pull up awesome cool links from the web, not the standard junk pages that have shallow content and are not hard to find. Even Google is getting infested with these kind of crap results. Nowadays, if I find an awesome link it is typically via a site like HN or somebody's blog, but I remember the days when I used to love going to Google and digging up fresh new links that were interesting.

3) Social is still "ripe for disruption" as they say. The flurry of interest around Google+ is evidence of this. People want more control, and more privacy, and a greater ability to differentiate their online identities without any one identity compromising the other. Eric Schmidt's response to this is "well if you have something to hide blah blah blah" but it's not about having something to hide. It's about the fundamental human need to interact differently in different social and economic settings. Maybe the guy who works as a cube jockey in some corporate wasteland needs to have his LinkedIn profile for trying to make it to the next level, but what about his sideline trying to network his way into a graphic design job? Maybe he needs a couple of profiles and wouldn't like to have to use his real name on either. Innovative approaches to allowing flexibility and growth on social sites (isn't that what the web is supposed to be about?) instead of locking people into one idea that they damn well better stick their RealName(tm) on... that is an area where Yahoo could step in and fill a void. Particularly if it was done right, and done in a way to leverage their existing myriad of user bases across the niche sites.

4) Quality. (Echoes of Steve Jobs and his quest for the perfect shade of yellow in an icon.) An enterprise-wide push for quality would help. Instead of being meh at 100 things, Yahoo could easily be awesome at those same 100 things. They already have the infrastructure in place, they just need to clean house and remodel. (This kind of ties back to point 1.) Flickr is a prime example. It's big, it's a brand name, it has a loyal user base, but it isn't awesome. It needs to be awesome.

5) Develop an identity. If the preceding four steps are done right, this will follow. Google's identity is "search plus a bunch of other crazy shit, and they have really cool offices to work at" right now. It works for them because search (advertising) makes them so much freaking money. But it's not really a coherent identity. Yahoo's identity could easily be "the coolest web portal with the best links". If Yahoo became synonymous with premium quality, they would be unstoppable.

It's a very interesting question. I use yahoo a fair bit for email accounts and for reading the news. I am not sure how they monetize this activity if at all.

Recently they forced me out of the old interface with email. Now I can no longer open emails I want to read by option-clicking on links to open them in new browser tabs. All mouse clicks are intercepted by the javascript on the page. Without the ability to do this the email is significantly slower and less easy to use than before. Now I am faced with finding a new email provider, and not gmail. If they had just left it alone or allowed me to use the old. No doubt others feel the same way.

But what do to? Well for news I read yahoo but comment on topix, which is community oriented. Yahoo should clone that. Unlike topix, yahoo seems to license their news content which should provide an advantage. Have news discussion local like with topix. Then sell local classifieds if you get enough local activity boards going and frequented. Might be hard at this point though to get people away from topix.

For me yahoo signified privacy and flexibility with the emails. I used to get news alerts on some topics but they never worked reliably or consistently. Haven't gotten one in a long time so I guess that feature was cancelled.

Oh I also use yahoo groups. These groups should have cloned the functionality of ning.com, to supplement and expand the mailing list paradigm. Yahoo groups have never worked well, screwing up the formatting of most posts and not having a smooth experience for integrating media. That all should have been fixed decades ago. Then try monetizing it like ning does with pay for extras and pay to be the premium ad free host.

A lot of the problems have a vibe that the programmers aren't great, or aren't around long enough to make things great. A lot has the feel of middle management dictating features to programmers rather than software designers being the developers and having the autonomy to own projects long term and make them great.