Is Yahoo! still useful?

[Joe Barker]

	To the list of Yahoo! shortcomings, I'd add that it is also not a
search of the text of the documents -- only of the classifications and top
of documents. 
	I believe Yahoo! corp is making money internationally and in 
their mini-city-Yahoo!s which compete with classified ads and yellow 
pages.  They seem to have abandoned the info business.
	Joe Barker

On Tue, 18 Nov 1997, Louis Rosenfeld wrote:

> 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/
> 
>