
Yahoo tops Google in US traffic - zher
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57599600-93/wait-what-yahoo-tops-google-in-us-traffic/
======
pasbesoin
I "Google" less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap.
They are mostly best for "big name" items; also, the prominence of
StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty
well.

These days, I'm fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I
can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page.

Whatever you are and aren't doing about it, Google, whenever I search for
something detailed that's not in StackOverflow, your results are increasingly
crap, once again. Pages and pages full of very spammy results.

Some time ago -- perhaps a few years ago or a bit more -- I became accustomed
to fairly quickly paging several pages into the search results, where the
heaviest, highly ranked spam would start to filter out and I could start to
recognize more legitimate sources of information. These days... the spam
results just go on and one. If there's quality somewhere in the search
results, it's beyond the limit of my patience to continue paging forward and
scanning.

Not that I'm using Yahoo, in preference. That part... all I can think of is
measuring by byte counts, and buttloads of banner ads. Probably not the right
explanation, but...

\--

P.S. Your (Google, again) elimination of the + operator in your search queries
was, again anecdotally, another factor in the declining performance of your
searches for me. Being able to tell the query engine that I _definitely_ don't
want to see results that don't include term x frequently proved quite useful.
Now... the damned thing shows me "whatever it feels like", whether I quote
terms, beg,.... any other suggestions?

~~~
thisisnotatest
Google engineer here.

We run experiments that show ranking improvements before launching changes to
how we interpret query words. I would guess that for every time you notice
Google "ignoring the word you asked for," there were several times where we
got you the right result even though it didn't have the exact words you asked
for, and you didn't even notice. We're not perfect but we're always working on
improvements.

We also added "Verbatim Mode" to save you the trouble of putting "each"
"query" "term" in "quotes" when you want to exactly match all your query
words.

~~~
mistermann
I would very much like an expandable section below the search text where I
could turn very specific portions of the google magic on and off.

I also wish you would remove the multitude of sites that scrape content from
the original sites and SEO the hell out of it to get to the top of search
results. I assume the advertising revenue is too lucrative to do so.

~~~
thisisnotatest
Personally I would be a fan of giving users more "knobs" to turn in their
search results. For example, we have the toggle switch to include personal
results and personalized ranking, vs. showing un-personalized search results.
However, it's a complicated product design problem whenever you want to add
complexity to something used by a billion people.

Remember that the thing that made Google so popular and iconic originally was
the plain search box.

~~~
rhizome
AV had a plain page, too.

------
brymaster
I don't doubt that Yahoo has a shit load of traffic still, but unless
Alexa/Quantcast/ComScore/Compete/Nielsen or any of these other so-called 'web
traffic measurement services' have direct access to Yahoo and Google's traffic
data (they don't), I'd take these all with a grain of salt. These services
have never been accurate.

[http://moz.com/blog/testing-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-
comp...](http://moz.com/blog/testing-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-compete-
google-trends-quantcast)

~~~
cagenut
One of those things is not like the other.

Go to yahoo.com, open devtools/firebug, scour the network tab for
"b.scorecardresearch.com", that's comscore. These numbers are as accurate as
can be.

~~~
debaserab2
The numbers for Yahoo may be accurate. What about Google and all the others on
the list? When I go to Google, I see no "b.scorecardresearch" anywhere to be
found on my network tab.

------
kulpreet
I just finished a 10 week internship at Yahoo and while I can't say much about
where the company is headed strategically, I can say that it's a super
exciting time to be working there :)

~~~
asperous
You mean you aren't allowed to say, or you aren't really sure?

~~~
mahmud
He/she was an intern. Typically, interns are neither privy to strategy, nor
are they sure of where things are headed.

~~~
reid
I work at Yahoo!. Our interns attend weekly meetings where strategy is
discussed. :)

~~~
mahmud
Tactics you mean. Tactics change frequently, to align projections with actual
results and market changes.

Strategy doesn't change as often, and has a longer lifespan. If your strategy
needs reviewing weekly you probably don't want to disclose it.

------
eksith
I've been experimenting with DuckDuckGo and I must say, I'm finding what I'm
looking for pretty quickly (minus junk results) in the first few results.
Their WolframAlpha results are actually pretty good too. I hope they can move
into image searching that isn't dependent on Google or Bing though.

I'm still curious as to what criteria they used to differentiate Yahoo traffic
under "Yahoo! Sites" though. Did they also include Flickr and other
acquisitions as well? (Tumblr seems to be on its own still)

~~~
oinksoft
I used DDG for a while and really wanted it to work for me, but for any non-
obvious search, it simply falls on its face. It's easy to take for granted how
good Google is at determining equivalent keywords based on context, or at
grokking context in general.

I only adopted DDG over privacy concerns, and StartPage is filling this need
wonderfully. Hopefully it stays up.

~~~
eksith
Ah yes, if I'm searching for something non-obvious, it does get a bit tedious.
It's not like Google where I still find it after the 3 or 4th page; the
results just get further and further from what I expect.

DDG's biggest problem so far is "grokking context" as you put it.

~~~
oinksoft
The contrast was/is starker: DDG would return pages of irrelevant crap, and
Google/StartPage would have exactly what I wanted in the first 1-3 results,
with usually 8 of the top ten being relevant. Google is simply leagues ahead
of the competition right now in both index quality and query recognition.

~~~
pessimizer
I hear this a lot, but no one ever gives me a search example that bears it
out. I !g sometimes after I'm just not seeing what I want on DDG, and as often
as not, the Google results are even worse.

~~~
oinksoft
Sure. Just now, I wanted to make sure I was right about elements that fire the
DOM "change" event for a guy in ##javascript by looking at Mozilla
documentation. Unfortunately, I had DDG active in my search bar in Firefox.
"mdn change" in DDG turns up nothing remotely useful, whereas the first result
in StartPage (Google) is what I want, and the subsequent results are all of
some interest. Google seems to understand the proximity of the name of a
common DOM reference and the name of a DOM event (probably via some graph) and
Bing/DDG is clueless.

------
meritt
ComScore's data is absurdly inaccurate and subject to considerable bias
(usually composed of less savvy internet users that have shady software
installed).

Anyhow. Kudos to Yahoo!

------
brandonbloom
Correct me if I'm making an unwarranted leap here, but why shouldn't I read
this as "More Yahoo users have spyware than Google users"?

------
dpcan
I believe it. I love the Yahoo homepage. And when I'm with a group and someone
mentioned something obscure... just about everyone mutters - "oh yeah, I saw
that on Yahoo."

Keep in mind, these are not a geeky bunch, I'm the only redditor among them.
We're talking about people who use their phones for everything and the
computer to browse the web or answer an email.

~~~
acchow
Where do you live?

I just went to Yahoo.com. I believe this is my first time. The frontpage
articles are "Jennifer Aniston's vacation bikini", "Bizarre Russian beach
scene", "Horned sea monster is a mystery", "Forgot something, Lindsay?", and
"Tycoons giving wealth away."

And that's the last time I go to yahoo.com

~~~
GFischer
Sounds like linkbaity links the average guy would like to click on :) (heck, I
might check out Jennifer's vacation bikini myself :) ).

My GF uses Yahoo, they redesigned the webmail recently and she was quite
confused (couldn't attach a file, we found that drag n' drop worked, but I
didn't find the attachment option).

------
alex_c
Yahoo tops Google in number of unique visitors, not (necessarily) in US
traffic. The cnet article misquotes the ComScore report.

------
manojlds
I think one of the reasons is that Yahoo announced that program to recirculate
mail ids, and people have been visiting their long forgotten mailboxes to make
sure they don't get closed.

~~~
snogglethorpe
Yahoo has always had an (insane) policy of fairly eagerly _deleting all mail_
from dormant mailboxes after 6 months, so it's not surprising people don't
trust them...

------
Stonewall9093
This supposedly doesn't count yahoo's recent acquisition - Tumblr - either.
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/08/21/yahoo-
tops-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/08/21/yahoo-tops-google-
as-biggest-website-says-comscore-even-without-tumblr/)

------
skizm
Fantasy Football begins. Seriously, that's all I use yahoo for but I use it a
hell of a lot during football season.

~~~
jaynos
That was my exact thought when I read this headline. My Yahoo usage from
January-->Mid July is no existent. Mid-July--> December is 4-5 times per day.

------
psbp
Could this possibly be the reason?
[http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/52805929240/yourname-yahoo-
com-...](http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/52805929240/yourname-yahoo-com-can-be-
yours)

I went to yahoo for the first time in 3 years because of this opportunity.

------
kevingibbon
Which Yahoo! properties could potentially be bringing this amount of traffic?

~~~
joseph_cooney
tumblr

~~~
dudus
The article says that Tumblr is still considered a separate entity and it
comes at #38

------
Abundnce10
Correct me if I'm wrong but these numbers don't include smartphone or tablet
numbers, correct? comScore's Multi-Platform numbers for July haven't been
released yet (that I'm aware of).
[http://www.comscore.com/Products/Audience_Analytics/Media_Me...](http://www.comscore.com/Products/Audience_Analytics/Media_Metrix_Multi-
Platform)

------
ConceitedCode
What constitutes "internet property"? Is this exclusively search or does this
include other products such as Tumblr?

------
ChrisArchitect
articles like this drive me nuts because now I've got a manager kicking ideas
around like must focus on yahoo/get web properties moving in yahoo....(which
shouldn't be a concern, indexed sites are indexed)...but it's so murky trying
to explain or even see yourself the clear situation

------
fatjokes
The reason is porn on Tumblr. People going through pages and pages of porn on
Tumblr...

------
mslate
This "news" is meaningless. Quality, not quantity is the name of the game.

------
zoom
Because of their malware "search" toolbar still on your grandmas computer?

Congrats yahoo.

------
adrianlmm
Try searching this on Yahoo or ddgo and then on Google:

ruby sinatra cors

Google still gives me the best results.

------
philip1209
I don't think the score is credible.

------
Maro
Traffic is a vanity metric.

------
chatman
This is a hoax, I am certain Yahoo is gaming the ComScore metrics in their
instrumentation.

------
constapop
Actual comScore data:
[http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2013/8/comSc...](http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2013/8/comScore_Media_Metrix_Ranks_Top_50_U.S._Web_Properties_for_July_2013)

------
gugol
Probably because Yahoo is not optimized :P

