7 Places Yahoo Is Winning The War Against Google - Search Engine Wars

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by solomonrothman

It’s common knowledge that Yahoo comes in a distant second place to Google in terms of search traffic, but Yahoo and Google represent a lot more than just search. Here is my list for the web services and properties where Yahoo has effectively out maneuvered Google and is ahead is both market awareness and user experience.

1. Yahoo Answers launched in 2005, after Google Answers had been a poor performer for a long time, Yahoo took their new service and pushed and promoted it on their main site. Yahoo Answers worked over Google, because of the user experience - it turns out people really enjoy voting on the “best answer” as well as surfing through the train wrecks. In addition the site has wonderful SEO in the other search engines (Yahoo’s answers tend to rank very well). Overall Yahoo Answers was so successful that Google ended it’s Answers service shortly thereafter.
2. Flickr is by far the most popular image sharing site on the web and has evolved into a complete social network with friends, testimonials, profiles etc. They’ve done an excellent job keeping the enthusiasm up and gaining loyal users by continuing to introduce new features and aggressively integrating flickr photos into all Yahoo’s other web properties / services. Google’s Picasso on the other hand may be a quality service, but lacks the sizzle and has no where near the user base or market penetration that flickr has achieved. Despite raising the size limits and other tech initiatives most people I talk with outside of the tech industry do not even recognize or equate Picasso with image sharing.
3. MyBlogLog - This little startup company had a nice way of answering an age old question (who visits my website?). It connected readers with publisher and had nice blog widgets that grew virally. Yahoo acquired them early on, so they were able to snap them up for a good price and almost immediately integrated mybloglog with flickr and the regular yahoo id. This was a very smart move, Yahoo s now owns a successful blog social network and Google dosen’t even have one yet. How can I sign up to see Google readers on my blog? I can’t. I even like the name MyBlogLog - nice move (there are many competitors to mybloglog, but none with the market share and user experience, well Blogcateglog is close, but no cigar)
4. Del.icio.us - Recently Yahoo has had one hit in the social media / network arena after another. Delicious.com started out with one of the worst domain names possible del.icio.us, but it didn’t matter, the simplistic execution made this grow to be one of the most popular social bookmarketing sites. Google has services related to social bookmarketing, but nothing directly competitve right now. Rumor has it Google will be moving in eventually with Google shared stuff.
5. Yahoo small business - it’s very easy and efficient to buy/ transfer, move and change domains at yahoo and setup yahoo store etc. Google has a tangled mess within google aps as the alternative. Google allows you to buy domains “through” them now via google apps or create pages, but I doubt they have anywhere near the DNS registrations yahoo small business, pages, or stores created through this service. Yahoo did a good job of simplifying these tasks and making the user experience easier.
6. Yahoo Messenger - Yahoo messenger is not an amazing program, but Yahoo launched it’s messenger service integrated with it’s Yahoo id very early on, so it had already been adapted by a huge user-base and is accepted as one of the messenger protocols you HAVE to support when talking to customers, etc. GoogleTalk on the other hand was launched too late, people are starting to resent the need for so many messengers and are seeking simplicity. I imagine Yahoo Messenger’s user base will continue to grow steadily.
7. Yahoo Directory - Although I don’t use general directories anymore to find things, Yahoo has figured out a way to make profit off all the webmasters needing links at the same time keep their directory moderated with far less abuse than Google’s aging nightmare dmoz.org, which Google dosen’t own or run, contains no ads is never updated but is cobranded with Google’s name here: http://directory.google.com/

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