Sunday, April 17, 2011

Yahoo's Evolution

Which is richer: Yahoo or Google? I don't care. In this post, I want to share a little bit about Yahoo in a chronological timeline. Yet I won't tell you a detail timeline. Instead, it's only a brief story as far as I'm concerned.
Ten years ago, Yahoo might be the biggest giant on the web. Its search engine was the most widely used by netters across the globe. Anytime the netters wanted to find something on the web, they went to Yahoo Search Engine. But now the most widely used search engine is not Yahoo anymore. It's now Google.
Facing this change, I find that Yahoo has made some change on their concept and design. It's simple. Just take a look at Yahoo's homepage, and compare it to its homepage ten years ago. The difference is there.
Ten years ago, search engine service - including Yahoo's Directory - was the most important part of Yahoo. Another important part is Yahoo Mail. After Yahoo was beaten by Google in search engine service, Yahoo began focusing on other things.
Certainly Yahoo is still focusing on its mail service. But they began offering some other services and put them as their new focus. You can find this focus shift on Yahoo's homepage design.

Yahoo still put a search box at the top, but it's not designed to be the focus of the page anymore. As a substitute, Yahoo put some news and feature headlines to be the focus of the page.
We can see that the page is divided into three column. The middle column is wider than the others. The middle column that is certainly designed to be the focus of the page contains some news and feature headlines.
This means that now news and feature service is set to be the most important part of Yahoo.
For this reason, Yahoo created local websites for different countries. In Indonesia, for example,Yahoo created Yahoo Indonesia website using url: http://id.yahoo.com. The content is totally local, and certainly tha language used is also local language (Indonesian language). As a consequence, Yahoo Indonesia is competing with some big, local online news service such as Detik.com, Vivanews.com, Kompasiana.com, etc.
Yes, Yahoo set news and feature service to be their new focus, beside their old mail service. But, that's not all. Yahoo also has some other services that are considered their secondary focus. All of the services offered by Yahoo are listed in the left column of the page.
Yahoo OMG (O My God) is one of the services. This is basically part of news, but it's more specific. It's news about celebrities. Yahoo knows that people pay quite much attention on this stuff, so they created a specific news about the stuff.
Also, there are some other services like Yahoo Group, Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Answer, and Yahoo Weather. All of these services are still considered the best. Yahoo Group - related much to Yahoo Mail - is still the people's first choice to share mails in group. Yahoo Messenger is also the first choice for instant messaging, beside MSN Messenger. Google Talk can not both of them.
Yahoo Answers is a very creative Yahoo's product. Here some netters write questions and other netters will write their answers. In many cases, people really need this simple service. The people want to know the answer of their questions.
Yahoo Weather is also a very outstanding service. I find that there is not any other weather forecast service that is as good as Yahoo Weather. People certainly need weather forecast in their daily life, particularly those who frequently make trip and journey.
This is my brief story about Yahoo's evolution. I can conclude that Yahoo has been evolving from a portal focusing on search engine, mail, and group - into a portal focusing on news, features, celebrity news, and some other services that are not handled well by any global portal. Will Yahoo evolve into another "creature" in the future? I don't know. But I know that everything changes except the change itself.

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