Why Does Yahoo Want to be Like Google?
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Sure, there are good, hard (monetary) reasons why Yahoo and every other search engine seems to want to be like Google. However, that might not be the best approach. Yahoo and Google start from different points, so molding itself after Google may not take Yahoo where it really wants to go.
If you look at the innovations that Yahoo and many of the other major search engines have made over the past few months (and maybe longer), it looks as if everyone wants to be like Google. And really, who can blame them? Google is wildly successful; the award-winning search engine has become synonymous with searching for something on the Internet. It is the first – and often, last – stop for searchers looking for everything from aardvarks (81,000 hits) to zoomorphs (567 hits), from open source software (more than 41 million hits) to Microsoft-compatible software (about five and a half million hits), and just about anything else you can imagine.
In the search engine business, an audience of that size translates to huge revenues. I hardly need to tell you that most search engines, including Google and Yahoo, make their money from advertising. Those who sell to advertisers typically follow a rule of thumb: the larger the audience an advertiser can reach, the more likely he is to part with a large sum of money. Actually, that’s an oversimplification; size isn’t everything when you can target your ads so that they are seen only by the people who are most likely to be interested in what you offer. But again, this is an area where a search engine, especially one used by as many people as use Google, excels. Who could possibly be a better candidate for a targeted ad than someone who is actively searching for something that relates to what the advertising business can provide?
It’s particularly interesting to watch the changes that Google makes, and see the other search engines institute similar offerings, because in some ways it’s such a classic example of the kind of thing that’s supposed to happen all the time in business. A field opens, one or two companies get there first, then, after they solidify their position, a newcomer gets in, shakes things up, and creates a new de facto standard. In the unhappy ending of the story, the newcomer ends up pushing the older companies out of business.
For those who can’t remember that far back, Google is the newcomer when compared with Yahoo. Yahoo just celebrated its tenth anniversary as a company this year; it incorporated in March of 1995. Google’s founders had just met at that time, and did not incorporate or become a company until mid-to-late 1998. Yes, this is only three years of difference, but we are talking about Internet time. Observers have stated at least as far back as 1997 that one calendar year equals four years in Internet time; you can easily do the math.
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