For a company that mostly stays out of the news, Yahoo! was stepping out this week. First there were rumors of a Microsoft buyout, then a rejection, and now Yahoo! appears to be looking for another knight on a white horse to save it from bankruptcy.
I can’t help but think this is unnecessary. Although Google and its guerrilla armies Wikipedia and Firefox are huge, they also can benefit Yahoo. Yahoo! also has many services, like its ubiquitous groups and Flickr, which are as widely-used as Google’s stuff if not more. Yahoo’s services, pound for pound, don’t have quality interface design and seem to suffer more glitches. These things can be fixed.
What Yahoo! really lacks is an integration strategy as fundamental and simple and flawed as Google’s. Google’s idea was that measuring the popularity of a link should determine its fitness as a search result, or at least get close enough. On top of this Google built the idea that search results for a keyword mean advertising dollars for that keyword, and built the first distributed advertising technology — cutting out all those media buyers and agencies.
Interestingly, although both of these companies have changed the way the world works, traditional media, mainly magazines and television, continues to influence the net more than any other factor. If it’s on TV, or in specialized magazines like People, National Geographic, Harper’s, Forbes and so on, it will be big on the net, and whoever is mentioned in those articles will inevitably get many people linking to them because they read about it or saw it on big media.
I think Yahoo! should return to its original model of doing things, in which it created a directory where real humans picked sites on the basis of expertise. This was from the Yahoo!-era of the net, before Google, when things were more idealistic and simpler. The reasoning goes that the links that are most popular are those that are easy to pass on to others because they’re funny, or introductory, or use one technology over another. At Yahoo!’s directory, what mattered was depth and mastery of subject matter. Its job was — like Wikipedia — to distill the net down into as few centralized data sources as possible. It’s still in many cases a way to get better results than a search engine, any search engine.
Google liked it so much they took over Mozilla directory, dmoz.org.
I hope Yahoo! pulls out of this tailspin. I think mostly what has got them is the monkey chatter factor, which happens when everyone around you is predicting doom and after hearing it for the six-hundredth time, you start to believe it. In other words, Yahoo! is depressed.
To me, Yahoo! is always going to be the friendly directory where you got results that someone spent brainpower on. Until our AIs are better, it’s still the model I prefer, even if it is more costly than Google. Then again, with so much advertising money riding on it, it might be worth it for Yahoo! to return to its original model and expand it while integrating its more recent services. They could take advantage of the ability to tag sites with classifications, like sales sites or reference sites, or goofy humor. They could even integrate some pricewatch-style type recognitions, so that people looking for products find products, people looking for reference find in-depth material, and so.
I don’t think the game is over for Yahoo!, if they’ll take the initiative and re-organize to fight back. Sure, it’s a long haul, but I can’t think of any other company in tech that’s more worth it.