Memo to Jerry: SELL!

May 20 2008 Published by Ben Chong under Business, Marketing, Product

There are reports of Microsoft offering to buy Yahoo’s search business.

My take on it?

Yahoo should sell.

Although it’s too early to declare that Internet search is being commoditized, Google’s lead as the preferred search engine means that anyone else trying to compete in that space is just wasting time.

Think of it, in order for Yahoo to continue to compete with Google as a search engine, it needs to invest in continually improving the search technology. Then there’s all the storage and infrastructure costs etc. At the same time, Yahoo’s search monetization is much less than that of Google.

It is going to be difficult for Yahoo to give up search. After all, that company started off in that space. All that emotional attachment to the past and talk about “core business” will get in the way of cooler heads. I don’t know if Jerry Yang will have the clout, guts and objectivity to jettison the search business.

Yahoo has a bunch of other properties which, IMHO, have more value than the search engine: Flickr, Yahoo Groups, YIM, www.yahoo.com etc

Flickr, in particular, has a pretty good future. Almost all popular social networking sites allow you to import photos automatically from Flickr. This makes it the default choice for social networkers who have tons of photos to share. Adobe’s new Photoshop Express also links to Flickr, which I thought was very clever of Adobe. I have not tried out Flickr’s new video capabilities, but I think that Flickr has a lot of room for growth.

Likewise for Yahoo Groups. If you are looking for dedicated mailing lists for your running club or MBA classmates, you don’t have to look further than Yahoo Groups. I have used Google Groups and Yahoo is still much better.

So Yahoo should objectively identify properties that have real value to users and room for growth. It should then dedicate resources to building up these properties to make them the “default” destination for their respective categories. Yahoo should also find ways to link these properties together seamlessly so that end users don’t get the impression that they are dealing with very disparate websites. Google does a really bad job of this.

Monetization? Well, just go with Google.

Oh, and take that money from Microsoft for the search business.

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Do you still Yahoo? Part 2

Apr 13 2008 Published by Ben Chong under Business, Marketing, Product

I had a conversation with a classmate yesterday and we got down to talking about Yahoo.

Apparently, there is now an effort to make the search bar more obvious on the Yahoo home page (URL: www.yahoo.com).

This really surprised me.

My question is: How many people are using a search engine’s home page to do a search on the Internet?

Most popular web browsers today have something called chrome search. This is the little text box next to the address text box. See picture below of the chrome search box on FireFox. This is on the top right corner of the web browser application window.

Chrome Search

Most people would be, by now, accustomed to using the chrome search box to do Internet searches. All you need to do is to click in the search box, type in your search text and hit enter. You can do this while you are at any website. There is no more need to navigate to www.google.com or www.yahoo.com to do a web search.

So what are these Yahoo folks thinking?

Or do they think that people still go to www.yahoo.com explicitly to do a search?

I go to www.yahoo.com multiple times a day. But I do that because I like the news and informational articles. See below.

Yahoo articles

Do I go to the search box on the page and do a search after reading the articles? No. I use the chrome search feature.

Perhaps the Yahoo folks know something I don’t. Perhaps they have done some usability surveys.

The Intel anthropologist that came to our class a few weeks ago brought up a very good point: people don’t use technology in a vacuum. In this case, you don’t surf the Internet in a vacuum. You use a web browser that runs on an operating system on a physical computer. How you surf the Internet is affected by the web browser, the operating system and the computer. Who knows? Perhaps the kind of mouse you use can affect how you surf.

I am also doing a usability survey for some of the same issues. The survey is here. There is no cost to participate :-)   In fact, you get a chance to win an Apple 8GB iPod Nano of the color of your choice.

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