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).