Why Does Yahoo Want to be Like Google? - Yahoo the Follower
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The rush to imitate Google became particularly noticeable around the middle of last year. That’s when Google started a beta that put every company offering free Web-based email on notice. I’m talking, of course, about Gmail. Instead of figuring that its users would be satisfied with a mere four or five MB of storage, Google upped the ante all the way to 1 GB. Yahoo responded in June 2004 by raising the storage capacity for its Web-based email…to 100 MB, only one-tenth of what Gmail offered. The company gradually continued to raise the storage capacity of the service, finally reaching 1 GB in March of 2005 – coincidently (or perhaps not so coincidently), the same month that Google took its Gmail service out of beta and opened it to all Google users. That same week, to trump this play from Yahoo, Google raised the storage capacity of Gmail.
You can see a similar story play out in areas that are more closely related to search. For example, take desktop search. Users of Unix-based systems are intimately familiar with the “grep” command, but those who use Microsoft’s various flavors of operating systems have often been less than thrilled with the search function that the software giant includes. I have used both “grep” and Microsoft’s search on the appropriate systems. They have two things in common: there is absolutely no guarantee that you will find what you are looking for, and they can take forever to finish.
Somebody at Google must have figured that, if its search algorithm can do so much to help people find what they’re looking for on the Web, surely it can do something to improve desktop search. The beta for Google Desktop Search came out on October 14, 2004. Yahoo followed up with a desktop search beta of its own, on January 11, 2005.
If you check the dates on Yahoo and Google press releases for various new features, you will see the same thing repeated over and over again: Google comes out with a new service, and Yahoo (and other search engines) copies it as quickly as they can. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Google must be one of the most sincerely flattered companies in the history of the Internet. If Yahoo thinks this is the correct approach, it is clearly not alone. That brings up one inevitable question: is this the correct approach after all?
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