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| Yes | 35% | 58 votes | Total: 168 votes | |
| No | 65% | 110 votes |
Yes
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Add to FavoritesCan Yahoo's search engine catch up with Google's search engine technology? Yes. Yahoo is growing at a rapid pace and recognizes the need to keep up with the fast pace of competitors. If you have ever noticed, Yahoo has transitioned rapidly in 2008. Yahoo has an updated email composer, homepage and search engine. The builders of Yahoo has recognized that Google is a world wind coming to take over.
Lets get into some basics. The more users you acquire the more money that brings in. The Google and Yahoo search engines is a pay per click market and Google is making all the right moves. Just recently, Google partnered with Overture. Thus increasing the cost per click basis increasing in funds.
Google recently introduced Gmail which allow one free gigabit of mail storage! Looks like uphill for Google. Rashtchy calculates that the search engines market will reach nearly $7 billion in revenue by 2007! Thats a growth of 35% each year. These numbers are attracting much attention. In 2003, Yahoo also signed on with overture in order to jump in on the competition.
I think that Yahoo definitely has a chance to catch up with Google's technology, but I seriously doubt it will be an overnight success. But I do think that it is possible. In order for this to be a success, Yahoo will have to research Google's technology. It may take some assumptions being that Google is very secretive about the way they run things. Yahoo will have to continually keep up with the changing patterns of Google and find out who they are joining with. I think that it would also be ideal, if Yahoo was to research areas where Google is not common, and take over that spot. It all adds up, just like the presidential elections, they become successful by winning over the small areas that people tend to look over. Yahoo should join forces with other small search engines as well. Thus increasing a pay per click basis. More advertising on various websites would be a good idea as well. Making a convenient way to look up information on various websites would gain much popularity. For instance, if you are visiting a dictionary website and additional information is needed, there should be a "click here to look up" that directly connects the user to a yahoo search engine with that particular information in mind. That would be extra money for yahoo as well. There are so many options and I am sure that someone has thought of these things before but now it is time to apply them.
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No
Recently, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google have all been in the news, shifting allegiances as they vie with one another to achieve superiority on one sector or another. The three giants have been duking it out for years over web-based advertising, various marketed products, and of course - online searches.
One of the first companies to provide a broadly used online search service, Yahoo! was founded in 1994 to help traverse the world wide web and find relevant information as web proliferation increased. It wasn't, initially, a search engine, but rather a categorized list of as many pages as possible. Quickly though, the idea grew out of hand, and their well known search engine was developed. While this search engine wasn't very elaborate, keep in mind that Yahoo! was one of the first to give an internet user the ability to search for content more efficiently. Yahoo! clicked. Quickly, it expanded into a web portal around its search engine, bringing various other features to its visitors with every company it acquired; Yahoo Mail from RocketMail, Yahoo Games from ClassicGames, Yahoo Groups from eGroups, the list goes on.
But here, it began to veer. It was no longer oriented only around its search, but aimed at keeping users as long as possible on their website to gain maximum revenue. Yahoo!, along with Microsoft's own web portal, MSN, shifted from relevance and helpfulness to corporate gains. Search algorithms returned links back to information within Yahoo!'s own conglomerate more often than without. A majority of Yahoo!'s revenue began to stream in from it's search advertisements, and the focus shifted more towards the paid advertisements than honing their own search engine.
Google began much later, and was also founded based on internet searches. But the difference in origin - and therein the rift that sets Google's search engine far above Yahoo! - is the way the search engine was developed. Like Yahoo!, it was begun by researching PhD students, and Google was founded to provide more accurate searches based on the the structure of the world wide web rather than keywords. Complex mathematical models and algorithms were developed to rank pages based on links from, to, and the ranks of the pages being linked to or from, and this formed the foundation for Google's search.
While Google also expanded into various other services and can no longer be considered only a search engine, it still revolves around it. Constantly, new web pages are being indexed, page ranks are continually updated, and Google's home page shows its attention first and foremost to search. Advertising still makes up a large part of Google's revenue, but the advertising is markedly separate from the results, and a lot of innovation goes into making more revenue from searches and advertising without compromising the integrity of the search.
That said, Yahoo! will definitely have great difficulty catching up to Google's search engine, and corporate history would teach us that only a miracle could give them that boost. Already, Yahoo! has fallen behind either Google or Microsoft in almost every aspect it once reigned in, and their inherently flawed system cannot recover. Yahoo!'s search engine, based on keywords, cannot hope to catch up to the years of work poured into the page rank system, and unless Yahoo! miraculously manages to set their advertising apart and simultaneously come up with a far more ingenious, accurate, and unprecedented search engine, I can't foresee Yahoo!'s search engine drawing internet users back to it.
Learn more about this author, Vanwaril.
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