Is Yahoo Dying?
Questionable aquisitions, inability to integrate new features, and incompatibility with Firefox may be spelling the end of an internet mainstay.
Have you tried browsing Yahoo with Firefox lately? Chances are if you try it regularly Firefox will crash. Tried doing a simple search on Yahoo owned Altavista only to have it redirect you to Yahoo’s cluttered page after the first page of results? These are just a few of the troubles leading some to believe that the venerable giant Yahoo is in it’s death throws.
When Google was powering past Yahoo in the search game, Yahoo bought Altavista, the leading edge search engine since 1996, and killed it.
Venerable Altavista Dies - Search Engine Lowdown, March 2004
With this baffling action Yahoo lost all the advantages of the Altavista brand, and the best chance to take on Google who is now leaving Yahoo behind, buried under the weight of it’s cluttered user interface. Purchases of Flikr, and Alltheweb have proved equally lackluster, failing to rejuvinate what some experts are beginning to call “a dinosaur that just hasn’t died yet”.
Yahoo tried to spark new interest with Yahoo Answers which is the misleading name of the section where the most non expert people in the world gather to guess at the solution to a user’s query which is so time limited as to be useless.
So while Google marches on toward search engine glory, and Myspace and YouTube become social and entertainment meccas, Yahoo tries to do all of the above and drowns in it’s own mediocritry.
How the mighty have fallen. 