Is Yahoo! still useful?

[Louis Rosenfeld]

On Tue, 18 Nov 1997, CMUNSON wrote:

>      Yahoo! has been one of the premiere web directories for several years, 
>      but I'm beginning to wonder if it's really up-to-date. Does anyone 
>      know of any articles or studies on Yahoo! or its content? I've 
>      submitted web sites half a dozen times to Yahoo! and they never got 
>      added. One was work-related and I asked 4 times over 6 months. Given 
>      the exponential increase in web content you'd think you'd see a 
>      corresponding increase in the number of new sites added.
>      
>      I see little evidence of this at Yahoo!
>      
>      Any observations?
>      
>      Chuck Munson
>      AAAS

Many have experienced these same problems; you might check Danny
Sullivan's survey of Yahoo's submissions process at
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/yahoo/ which came out in August. 

It's not surprising that an effort to centrally classify just about
everything on the Internet has fallen apart.  Why should such an endeavor
ever have been expected to succeed?  It's just too much work for one
organization to take on. 

Although it likely wasn't Jerry Yang and David Filo's original motivation,
the folks at Yahoo have probably known for quite some time that the Yahoo
directory was itself going to rapidly decline in quality, and that it made
sense to leverage the directory's initial and very public success into a
public offering, which in turn funded entry into other business venues
(e.g., Yahoo Life, partnerships with content providers, etc.).  This same
"get attention and go for an IPO" model was also likely OpenText's
motivation for creating their search engine, now little heard from since
their IPO.  Oh well, call me a cynical old fart... 

The sad thing is that users continue to be sold a bill of goods that Yahoo
is "the place" to go to for the best information on Internet resources. 
Most people have no idea that Yahoo is neither comprehensive, up-to-date,
or accurate. I think this is misleading; Yahoo should either do the job it
claims to do or get out of the directory business altogether.  This would
be the ethical thing to do.  Oh well, call me a naive idealist... 




Louis Rosenfeld                                             lou at argus-inc.com
Argus Associates, Inc.                                   http://argus-inc.com
109 Catherine Street                                   voice: +1.313.913.0010
Ann Arbor, MI  48104  USA                                fax: +1.313.213.8082

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web  (L. Rosenfeld & P. Morville)
O'Reilly & Associates; Jan 1998.      http://www.ora.com/catalog/infotecture/