
Yahoo Chief: ‘We Have Never Been a Search Company’ - newacc
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/yahoo-ceo-we-have-never-been-a-search-company/?ref=technology
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jeremymims
Finally, someone there said it.

They own many of the top content properties on the internet and they are very
profitable (not as profitable as they could be, but pretty darn profitable).
Sure they could have bought Google, Facebook, or any of the other companies
that ended up being the top of search or social networking, but they didn't.
So it makes sense to play in the games where they're successful.

It's like saying Michael Phelps isn't also a great athlete because he can't
beat Usain Bolt in the 100 meter. Or vice versa. Google's content properties
universally have failed to make a dent against Yahoo's strengths. So Google
can't be the Yahoo of content and Yahoo can't be the Google of search. We
should be okay with that.

At some point the market needs to stop judging them on what they might have
been, and see what they actually are and might become.

~~~
tybris
Seems like Yahoo! is starting to regain some goodwill. Maybe developers will
also start to realise how insanely awesome their APIs are.

<http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html>

~~~
warfangle
I've always wondered why jQuery (and prototype) are the default javascript
libraries for many people. The YUI library is fast, featureful, and maintained
by some of the best JS devs in the industry (sorry resig, but I think
Crockford knows a little bit more about JS than you).

Is it because Yahoo! isn't a "cool" company? Is it because RoR is so tightly
coupled to prototype? Is it because they had kind of an unwieldy namespace
before they updated that?

I find their XHR, event, and dom manipulation interfaces much easier to work
with than prototype or jQuery - these are good until you need to do some
serious heavy lifting. I've had several instances where I had to create XHRs
manually because prototype just didn't give me the access I needed.

~~~
jeresig
Crockford doesn't work on YUI - but he does work at Yahoo. I will fully
concede that he may know more about ECMAScript than me - but I will happily
challenge him on JavaScript + DOM any day :-)

Quite seriously though, since jQuery and YUI came out at nearly the same time
back in early 2006 - I feel that it has to do with the simplicity of the
jQuery API and the active community that's grown around jQuery. YUI has always
had better documentation (even though jQuery's has been good), so that can't
be it.

A couple points:

\- You can always do more complicated work with simple APIs but it's
fundamentally harder to do simple work with more complex APIs.

\- YUI didn't promote external plugins or development communities. For example
the ExtJS library that grew up based upon YUI was left to stagnate and grow on
its own rather than become part of YUI itself. If the YUI team worked to bring
Jack Slocum on board YUI would be in a much more dominant position than what
it is now.

\- YUI has been closed to outside contributions for most of its life. No bug
tracker, no outside patches, etc. It's only recently that they've truly Open
Sourced both the code and the process surrounding the library.

I do find it to be odd, as well - YUI really should be more popular than it
is. It's well written, well documented, and is well maintained. Even after all
of that its market share is shrinking.

[http://google.com/trends?q=jquery+javascript%2C+yui+javascri...](http://google.com/trends?q=jquery+javascript%2C+yui+javascript)

~~~
zackattack
I've been building checkers to learn jquery. firebug enabled + red moves
first:

<http://notsquidnote.com/checkers/checkers.html>

~~~
benatkin
Have you considered posting it to a site like <http://refactormycode.com/> ?
You're more likely to get feedback there. I posted once and I got good
feedback right away.

<http://refactormycode.com/codes/826-monthly-calendar-library>

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raghus
Well, at the very minimum, Carol Bartz has framed the conversation around how
Yahoo's doing and being measured differently.

Earlier, it was Google's % share of searches vs Yahoo's: a rather stark and
quantitative loss every quarter and every year. Now, I'm not quite sure what
it is but at the very least it is not that.

~~~
jeremymims
I look at this statement as the moment when Steve Jobs brought Bill Gates on
screen and announced that Microsoft was not the enemy anymore. It freed the
company from the market share game where they were perpetually losers and
allowed them to just create great products for their users.

Changing the story changed their destiny.

I knew of a profitable print publication that had a readership of about 90,000
people in the 1980's. But management saw other publications in similarly sized
niches that had 100,000. They fought tooth and nail to get those extra 10,000
readers and spent incredible amounts of money to get them. But it actually
pushed them into the red.

There's something very powerful about focusing on your real market and doing
what you're good at.

Yahoo now has a clear goal of becoming and acting like the number 1 content
company on the web. I think this clarity will bring positive results.

~~~
benatkin
Apple's arrangement allowed them to eventually come back around and start
competing with Microsoft. (If you don't think so, look at the popularity of
Webkit on phones and within Google.) I don't think Yahoo!'s arrangement will
help them do that. I've got to ask, who's Yahoo!'s enemy? SmugMug? I agree
with 37signals and Jeff Atwood that it's a good idea to have one. If you're
going to expand, who's market share are you going to take?

<http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Have_an_Enemy.php>

The nice thing about the Apple-Microsoft deal is that everyone still knew that
Microsoft was Apple's enemy.

------
joshu
We have always been at war with Eurasia.

~~~
jeremymims
I think it would be wrong to say that Yahoo has always been a search company.
It's also a mistake to say they've never competed and tried to build their own
search product. But they really never have been a "search company" in the way
that Google is.

They are probably the number two internet property in terms of page views. If
google has 70% of the search market and Yahoo has less than 20%, Yahoo
couldn't possibly be competitive in terms of page views if they really were
primarily in the search business.

~~~
joshu
Actually, the problem is that they thought they WERE a search company, in the
way that Google is.

My point is, instead, the ongoing bizarre otherworldly logic of their
management.

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benatkin
To me, search specifically is something you don't want to give an impression
you aren't good at. There are more types of "search" than just keyword search.
There's ambient findability, which Flickr does and Bing is trying to do as
well. Showing related items could gain from knowing about search. Is the Bing
team going to dig deep into Flickr or is Flickr going to need to continue to
be good at search? (And in the case of Flickr, there's plenty of room for
improvement.)

I'm trying to think of a good analogy. Anyone want to chime in?

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simonsarris
Man I remember back when Yahoo Search was powered by Google.

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zandorg
This article reads like a parody:

    
    
       +“I am a very viable number,” she said.
    
       +The guard, um, encouraged Brad Stone and me to treat Ms. Bartz with respect. “She’s my girl.” (???)
    

Not to mention them not mentioning trashing Geocities.

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brianm
We have always been at war with Oceania?

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kmano8
Did Yahoo not begin as a search portal?

~~~
anigbrowl
No. it began as a subject catalog - Art, building, cooking, dining... In fact
when it first launched it was literally just one page of links, then it became
a page of links to pages of links, and so forth. <http://www.dmoz.org/> (open
directory) is the closest thing to what Yahoo used to be like and probably
helped to inspire Wikipedia too.

back then search was possible but excruciatingly slow - you could use other
net services like WAIS or Archie but it was the sort of thing you'd leave
running the background. Plus those services were terminal based so navigation
was tedious if you were on dial-up. Having all that stuff classified and
aggregated on one website was a godsend. The amazing part is that in its early
incarnation it was so simple _anyone_ could have done it. Literally, just
links and descriptors. I've often wondered if attitudes of and towards Jerry
Yang have something to do with the extreme simplicity of how Yahoo started
out, and the 'right place right time' versus any definable innovation.

I never, ever thought of Yahoo as a search engine - if I did a search there, I
assumed I was searching their internal catalog rather than the whole internet.
Lycos and Altavista were the search engines of choice, while Yahoo was the
homepage where I went for aggregated content. Then one day I tried Google and
never went back.

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okeumeni
Really? ...

