Google Over Yahoo! By a Knockout

Ken's Blog

Yahoo! has overturned the apple cart again. This time, it has pulled the plug on the Yahoo! Bid Tool, literally. Try doing a search with this formerly useful tool and all you'll see is this message (unless they respond to pressure and change this after this is written -- I'm sure I'm not the only one bugged by this)...

That started me thinking (uh-oh)...

What does this seemingly harmless little window mean? It's a symptom of a big problem at Yahoo! Think about it...

There's no nicely formatted Web page to explain the absence. No "We're sorry." No redirect to a new replacement. Just that blunt, rude message that really says "we don't care."

When you remove the Yahoo! Bid Tool without any notice, you upset people. When you "announce" that in the way shown above, you disrespect them. Yahoo! either knows this and does not care or didn't even think about it...

I'm not sure which is worse. But if you take a step back and think about the psychology of the folks who make the decisions behind the closed doors, the page above pretty much says it all.

Yahoo! seems to make it their mission in life to be difficult, from interfaces that change constantly, to not enabling its advertisers to download data, to a keyword suggestion tool that has not been improved for years, to their own poor version of "Sitemaps" (causing Webmasters to scramble needlessly before Yahoo! finally accepted Google's open-source invitation).

The difference between Yahoo! Search and Google is staggering. Put the actual "product" aside for the moment. From corporate culture to usability to public relations, Google simply "gets it."

Google leads. Yahoo! follows (ex., Sitemaps).

Google is stable, improving and simple in every way. Yahoo! is constantly changing (trying to play catchup), getting worse and more complex/clunky.

Google courts Webmasters in so many ways (communications, tools, etc.). Yahoo! alienates them. And disrespect bothers me immensely.

In the world of search and all that relates to it, Yahoo! is reactive while Google is proactive. Yahoo! is closed. Google is open. Yahoo! is stilted, while Google is imaginative.

It's Google by a knockout.

All the best,