Is Yahoo Trying Too Hard To Out-Google Google?
Search Engine Guide’s Steve Malone has an excellent article discussing the possibility that it is Yahoo’s Dan Rosensweig, their current COO, who may be responsible for Yahoo’s attempts to match Google’s every move. He cites experience with Dan during some market share wars between C|Net and ZDnet, where they both worked, as evidence.
Now, while admitedly Yahoo has done some “feature-matching”, as have Google, MSN, and everyone else, most of Yahoo’s projects have been just great. Yahoo Video Search is, at least until Google puts more than transcripts online, far superior. Flickr is far more popular than Picasa, and even though they are very different products, it puts Yahoo’s photo management at a higher level. Yahoo 360, their blogging service, may not match Blogger, but viewed as a social networking product it has more potential than Orkut. Additionally, the search wars are a battle for the minds of web surfers. Perhaps the PR boost from product launches is in many ways the object, more so than the products themselves.
Either way, we get a lot of good crap from all these companies.
