My relationship with Yahoo has been a rocky one. I want it to succeed. I really do. But time and time again the company has managed to shoot itself in the foot. And given the bloated bureaucracy, I’m amazed Yahoo can even see it’s feet.
It’s simple really, Yahoo forgot what’s important: the user. While I worked there, I was constantly disappointed with the rhetoric at All Hands meetings: advertisers were seemingly top of the chain, followed by publishers, the lastly, the user. The guise was to bring them all together on an equal playing field. But they really aren’t, as the user gets the short end of the stick. Paid Inclusion (paying to bump a page’s relevance) is proof of that.
Oh sure, every month they release some fancy new “web 2.0″ interface tweak that maybe a handful of users care about, but it does not change the underlying issue of search. In ignoring the user, they also forgot they have two very powerful game changers that are wasting away to irrelevance: Flickr and, most importantly, del.icio.us. Before twitter, and most social bookmarking services, there was del.icio.us, and if it was correctly applied, could be reliable human powered search. In my own experiences, I search delicious before Google if I’m browsing general topics, since I know the most reputable sites will be represented (by frequency of bookmarks).
So I’ll end with my simple proposal: Drop Paid Inclusion. Integrate delicious results to Yahoo Search.
Say what you will about Google, there’s one thing they put first above anything else, and it’s their users (and their data, but that’s another story).
So those of you who know me know at one point I used to work for Google. You probably know that I quit Google as well. I read this awhile back on Techcrunch story, and figured I’d add my own experience.
The first phone call I received from the recruiter was curious but standard: background info, et cetera, et cetera. The recruiter didn’t really elaborate what the job he was polling me for was but did send me a (ridiculously basic) worksheet to test my familiarity with some basic web concepts. All I knew is was that it would be an analyst position, which seemed interesting to me. At this point, I’m not very familiar with the aura of the interview process revolving Google, so I go with it. After I send it back, I’m called asking if I’d be interested in interviewing and, naturally, I say yes. At this point, I still don’t know what the job is exactly.
The interviews themselves were pretty straightforward; as I’m driving back home to San Luis Obispo from Mountain View, I get a phone call saying I’ve been offered a job. One catch though, it was a contractor position. Being naive, dazzled by the pretty lights, and unfamiliar with the work world, I dropped my thesis work and took it happily.
The work was far from challenging. It was an exercise in ad nauseum tedium. I have no doubt that at some point the job will be rendered useless by Google’s gains in automation. Nevertheless, this was not what I signed up for. What was so crazy was that my coworkers on that team were a collection of very intelligent college grads. Many were engineers, mathematicians, artists, teachers; all very accomplished, relegated to menial tasks. The promise of full time employment, graduating from our contractor status, kept most of us in check. In essence, this process was a “boot camp”, meant to make Google soldiers out of us.
My manager demanded loyalty and those that succeeded fell in rank and file. No questions asked, do as your told, and you have a job. The management team in general was very secretive and did not elaborate as to the purpose of many of the tasks we worked on. It was when I started asking questions that the problems started to arise. After lots of smoke and mirrors and several interviews later (for the full time position), I pulled out to take a full time job at Yahoo.
There were some great things that happened at Google. That feeling that you were around greatness and working for a product that I deeply believed in was awesome. But, you do pay a price.
It’s funny, I ended up leaving Google because I didn’t believe in the job, but I believed in the company. I left Yahoo because I believed in the job, but was starting to doubt the company.