Is Yahoo! still useful?

[Nick Arnett]

At 04:39 PM 11/18/97 -0800, Louis Rosenfeld wrote:

>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... 

Not quite fair, Lou... Open Text has turned itself around quite a bit by
becoming a document management system in addition to a search engine.  It's
quite a different model from the rest of us in the search business, who
actively avoid writing code for anything that looks or smells like a
document repository.  It has been a good move for them; their engine is very
fast, but lacks a lot of the sophistications for high accuracy and such.

>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... 

How about "naive idealist old fart?"  ;-)  Seriously, though, I've come to
believe that one of Yahoo's strengths is that they don't do anything
particularly well except package things, much like Microsoft.  The value is
in the synthesis of technologies and content.  They don't categorize
particularly well and they don't offer particularly good search.  But they
package the heck out of it and get it in peoples' faces.  I think of them as
the Aldine Press of the Internet revolution.  Aldus didn't have the best
typography or the best content, but the Aldine Press was a huge success,
partly because they figured out how to get the "geeks" and "people who wear
comfortable shoes" (in the words of one of the speakers in Michigan this
year) to compromise.  Meanwhile, Gutenberg's venture capitalists sued him
because he refused to ship a product while he tried to improve typography to
the quality of illustrated manuscripts.  Gutenberg died bankrupt but his
typography is still regarded as outstanding.  The Holy Roman Empire, which
was the source of most of the content, tried to control distribution of
ideas and lost much of its power, largely as a result of a different kind of
bankruptcy.  Aldus succeeded partly because he figured out how to do simple
things like title pages and catalogs.

Ah, well, I should go home and work on a book about this, instead of writing
a long message here...

Nick
--
       Product Manager, Knowledge Applications
        Verity Inc.  (http://www.verity.com/)
        "Connecting People with Information"
  Phone: (408) 542-2164  E-mail: narnett at verity.com