Yahoo! chief! Marissa! Mayer! stings! Bing! in! ad! bling! fling! win! Yahoo! is rubbing its hands at the thought of juicing more ad revenue from people using its Bing-powered search engine – after tweaking its 10-year deal with Microsoft. Back in 2009, Yahoo! agreed to use Microsoft's Bing for its web search, allowing the Redmond giant to place ads on results pages. Under the terms of the a …
Unless you're talking about post Googles arrival on the scene, the best memory I have of Yahoo is of them being marginally better than no search at all, and that only by a whisker. When they started out they looked like the answer to the webs problems with finding things, but it was only a matter of months before porn sites figured out how to game the results and that was pretty much the end of 'useful' - unless you consider choosing a random page 20 or so back from the first as a starting point 'useful'. If you were dead lucky, hundreds of results in you might have got past the smut and found a few that vaguely fitted your query, but it was hit and miss and very frustrating.
For a long time I stuck with the open directory project, at least for subjects I was familiar with and tried other search engines with little better results. I think the last I vaguely stuck with before Google was probably Metacrawler or something similar. After that lot, Google was frankly a breath of fresh air.
Even when Yahoo finally managed to banish the smut the results were pretty tragic, but they still managed to render themselves unusable by apparently mating their landing page with a fruit machine on steroids and killing all but the most demented offspring, producing something even an adblocker can't cure. I can only assume someone likes it because the same functionless mess persists.
Yahoo shot themselves in the foot long ago by investing zero real effort into improving search, but instead putting their back into turning their dominance into cash and using that to buy more property whilst naively assuming their status as top dog was inviolable. They were so wrapped up in themselves they didn't even see Google coming.
Personally, I have no sympathy at all for them over their basically self-inflicted demise. Google's dominance may be a whole pile of different problems on its own, but at least in getting to a near monopoly position they provided a genuinely useful service and have raised the bar considerably for anyone wanting to compete, so we now have alternatives, albeit currently small, like Duck Duck Go that actually provide high quality results without the shenanigans of their predecessors.
I had forgotten that yahoo was still a thing.
They seem to come to life periodically to buy one of my favourite services and kill it without trace. Astrid anyone? It would be OK if they invested and expanded, but all that seems to happen is a vague announcement about improving yahoo services, and the cool service closes without even a yahoo equivalent. It's like a malevolent jealous aunt shooting dead the suitors of her young niece.
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