Common people feel that there are myths behind the success of all big companies, but an educated person will always go for the strategy comparison of those big names. One might often wonder about Yahoo! and Google’s success. What were the reasons which once made Yahoo! an internet giant? And what happened with the emergence of Google?
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Why Google left Yahoo! far behind after its late arrival in the internet world? In this article, we’ll try to cover major reasons which made Google more prominent and famous than Yahoo!; even Yahoo! was formed before Google.
To know about the current marginal distance between these two big names, first we should analyze the history of both. Yahoo!’s concept started in 1994 from the personal favorite links collection of David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. They used to manage their favorite website links in categories and subcategories. When their lists became so gigantic, they started a formal guide to World Wide Web named as Yahoo!. You can see it originated as a portal sort of website and a search directory providing different website links on it. Taking a two year struggle span, in 1996 it was widely sponsored and funded by big names like Reuters, Softbank, Apple Computer, Atari, and Cisco. Yahoo! is more like a portal where apart from searching the internet facility; you will get advertisements, referral marketing links, and worldwide news. Yahoo! started using Google’s search facility but later on in 2004 Yahoo!’s own search algorithms were developed.
In contrast if we see into history of Google, it started as a search engine in 1996 by Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It only focused on providing the relevant search results on internet and was ranked among top 100 websites of 1998. With the passage of time, Google kept focusing on just being a strong search engine with the introduction of MentlePlex and multilingual Google search facilities. Google Adwards, Adsense, Apps, Blogger, and other Google services came one by one slowly but steadily in upcoming years and were widely loved among internet users around the global village.
Yahoo! in all these years kept focusing on the advertisement, referral marketing, and shopping features, while Google targeted real people and provided services which humans really want. A portal website doesn’t only provide the email, news, shopping links, but in today’s world it ought to include many more services which are the real needs of customers. You can see Google introduced services like Google Apps, Google Docs, open source mobile programming language named Android, Google Books, Google maps and many other services, while Yahoo became stubborn enough to jump into these variant fields. And later on when Yahoo started providing facilities such like Yahoo mobile, it is too late.
Even in search engine field Yahoo! has lost search shares to Microsoft’s Bing and Google. If we talk about bias of search engines’ search results we out to first know that each search engine is run by a for profit corporate taking care of their own interests first. But Google and Bing as compared to Yahoo! show more relevant search results than the shopping or advertisement focused Yahoo! results. Truly speaking, comparing Yahoo! and Google is not that sensible as these are two different sorts of websites, Yahoo! more like a web portal and Google more like a search engine which now has started offering a wide range of services which not surprisingly are widely loved too.
[Thanks Yahoo Docs , Google History , SEOBook , DifferenceBetween , CMSWire ]
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