

A sad story of an Internet Search Giant - jitbit
http://blog.jitbit.com/2012/04/once-there-was-search-engine.html

======
nck4222
It's hard to agree that Yahoo has "collapsed," when it's the 4th most visited
website in the world.

~~~
mattdeboard
I think the point being made is that as a business it has collapsed. Just
having mind- or browser-share isn't the only metric of whether or not a
business is thriving (or collapsing)

------
ryutlis
Here, I'd like to quote one of my friends' opinion: Google, right now, is
driven by fear, not by vision. This fear-driven development (FDD... :-D ), is
not a good sign. I don't know whether it's because when the organization
exceeds certain size, this must happen or there are other reasons behind it,
but I do believe that, when exceeds some limit, innovative and creative idea
lost the best environment to grow, unless you try to keep the organization at
a reasonable scale.

------
randall
I think what the HN comments are missing is the tech blogs only care about
what people have done for us lately. IE people say Yahoo is collapsing because
it seems like their potential for innovation is gone, and instead they're
moving into patent trolling. Microsoft was the same way in 2007, but with
Metro, now bloggers are giving them a shot again.

Google isn't over, but it's unclear if the company's innovative spirit
remains.

------
cryptoz
Is anyone actually comparing the bells and whistles on yahoo.com to the ones
on google.com? The sites are like night and day.

~~~
akshat
Would you stop visiting Google if it had a homepage full of news?

Having a sparse homepage is not the reason why Google is winning today, or why
Yahoo lost.

~~~
pearle
I likely would stop visiting Google as frequently as I do.

The sparse homepage is one of the main reasons I switched to Google way back
in the day.

------
damian2000
Did Yahoo ever dominate basic search? Directory maybe but search?

~~~
jitbit
Yep, Altavista. Before writing that blog post I verified all the facts at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Yahoo>! (image hosting is Flickr,
blog/social platform is Yahoo-360, other services include Yahoo Groups, Yahoo
messenger, GeoCities page hosting, Yahoo Mail, Overture (paid search ads) and
other services.

~~~
shortformblog
But … wait. They didn't acquire Altavista until 2003, when it was already dead
in the water.

~~~
jitbit
Yep, 2003, my bad... But Yahoo still dominated the search anyways. According
to December 1999 stats they had 56% market share (while nearest competitor -
Excite - had 11%, Google was <1%)

------
huggyface
I find this story hilarious because in its reach to setup Yahoo as a parable
for Google, they actually describe _exactly how Yahoo faltered_ \-- Yahoo had
their lunch eaten by Google as users found that hierarchically organized lists
of links was usurped by text search: Why would I want to labour through
hierarchies when I could just type my city and pita, for instance.

Yahoo later bought the collapsed remains of a failed AltaVista but it was too
late. The web had pivoted away from what Yahoo was offering, and the company
has been in decay mode since.

So if the lesson was that Google can't sit on their laurels, expecting the
world to stay static, then I commend this article for its insight. But I
suspect that wasn't the author's intention.

~~~
tsunamifury
Uh, did you read the final quote? Give the author some credit, he knew exactly
what he was paralleling.

------
funkah
I don't think Google is on a good path right now, but I would majorly hesitate
to compare them to Yahoo. Yahoo has dawdled for years with no clear vision of
what the hell they are doing. In fact, you could argue that Page's current
strategy is a play _against_ turning out like Yahoo. It's a pretty clear
vision, even if I don't like it, and it's certainly product-oriented. They're
focusing on one product and streamlining all the random crap they used to do
just for the hell of it.

I don't know what will happen with Google, but I don't see Yahoo's fate in
their future.

------
peterwiese
the tech-blogs' perception of google is so far off reality. google isn't
loosing. google just entered a new market (social) which has a huge barrier of
entry, thus they're fighting to get a foot in this door. within their
traditional domain (search/advertising) they're unrivaled. all the "google is
doomed" talk is based on the potential entry of facebook into the search
market. however, this hasn't happened yet and if or whenever it should we'll
see how that goes. until then, i'd like to not read the same shit over and
over every day on hackernews.

~~~
glenra
Much of the "Google is doomed" talk is based on the mere fact that Google is
entering these new markets. Getting spread too thin is the fear. Google
_could_ focus just on being the best search engine it can possibly be but it's
not doing that, it's trying to do dozens of other things too. Some of those
things are innovative and cool (self-driving cars!) but other things seem like
stupid me-too efforts (everything they've done so far in "social"). Nobody
cares about "the potential entry of Facebook into the search market" - that
would just be as big a warning sign for Facebook as Google+ is for Google.

Trying to do too many things at once is a good way to do them all badly.

