With Google going IPO, it looks like they are moving towards what Yahoo! has already done successfully.
Yahoo! has a network of web sites for various topics, to list few popular ones are:
mail.yahoo.com, news.yahoo.com, games.yahoo.com, finance.yahoo.com, groups.yahoo.com , shopping.yahoo.com, sports.yahoo.com & many many more.
And we have been seeing over the past one year how Google has been following in each of the above services what Yahoo! already had. Gmail, google news and so on.
All signs that Googel is trying to smartly follow Yahoo! & nothing more, I see Google is rather a next version of Yahoo! & have a log way to get there ;)
I do agree that Google search is good, but I was really wondering why Yahoo! is left out in the list of search engines in mouthshut, Yahoo! has been there since the early days of internet & www and shown the world how to do business out of search.
Consider for example image search from Yahoo! (images.yahoo.com) it’s is twice the size of Google images & far better in terms of quality of coverage. I have been using Yahoo! search for the past 6 Years & I feel it rocks, I also consider Google as my search destination after Yahoo!.
Once I am on Yahoo! I can play games, post my trip photos, check coverage of my favorite sports, check the weather today, check my finance portfolio and so many other useful services which I need everyday.
For example I use Geocities to host my personal page & there are some key features what I get with Geocities which I don’t see in any other Free Hosting services.
For each HTML file stats are collected , stats include, which search engine users are using to get to my page, what is the search key-word, what’s the OS, what’s the Browser & even Screen resolution all these are very important for any one who wants to tune their home page & get more traffic . This is very useful for even a novice user who can find this information very useful.
Recently Yahoo! released the beta version of mysearch.yahoo.com, which has lot of personalization features.
Brief Summary: MySearch allows us to Save or Share or Block each results for out query terms, this gives a user more control over what he/she wants to see in the results page & at the same time Save & share his favorite results with his friends. For all these personalized events to happen a Yahoo! ID is required.
Features:
1) Save & Save with notes: This option allows any result to be saved to My Web, where user can see all his Saved Results. Additionally user can create & move results to various categories of interest & doing this helps in sharing specific results in s folder. Saved results can be sorted by Date, URL, Title & How I found it (I liked this one) .
2) Search My Web: This Search button helps in searching Saved results in ’My Web’.
3) Share: This is a simple email handler page, which allows to enter multiple email ID’s (but up to 255 characters) & optionally user can add comments on what is being shared.
4) Visited Results: This is the History of Pages visited from the result page, this helps in quickly knowing which pages have been visited, this is available in Search results page & in My Web page. Again results here can be sorted & shared.
5) Blocking: Thus helps in blocking what a user feels are unwanted results. The URL’s here can be selectively blocked or unblocked here. I have used A9.com & myjeeves.ask.com personalization feature & found Yahoo! to be way a head & better than these.
Overall I see Yahoo! as my on-line Destination & much more than a search engine.
Sad that Mouthshut has no section for Yahoo! :(