What’s Happened to Yahoo?
Yahoo appears to have been lost for the past three years or so. Having lost footing in the web search marketplace, it has struggled around in the wilderness, not fully sure what to do or exactly how to boost profits. Latest news suggesting Yahoo is about to be bought has increased share prices nonetheless if the buyout strategy does not go ahead, what will come to be of the once dominating web giant?
Yahoo currently represents a tiny proportion of queries made online. Google is unquestionably the indisputable search engine utilized by millions of customers. In an area that was once slightly over loaded, Internet users are now largely left with a few dedicated search engines to choose from. Apart from Google and Yahoo there is currently Bing (Microsoft’s latest offering), Ask and AOL. Search engines from yesteryear are now gathering dust. In reality, Bing and Yahoo’s joint market share is even now dwarfed by Google.
Nonetheless, this is simply the tip of the iceberg to Yahoo’s issues. Yahoo was dominant on an Internet when no company functioned like Google. Google’s search engine power relies on the fact that it’s focused on simplicity. Google really does search, and it does search really well. It also boasts a lot of additional features but their search result pages do not get cluttered with this. Yahoo even now adopts a portal site design similar to lots of its competitors that have also fallen by the wayside. Consumers seem to favor simplified layouts and uncluttered designs. Still, this is not to state that people are looking for less functionality. As Google has clearly proven, there is a substantial demand for a lot of unique applications such as news, galleries, emails etc. But crucially what Google has excelled at is providing multiple different functions but keeping simple.
This isn’t to say that Yahoo is about to shut down. Levels of competition benefits business and providing Yahoo is engaged in the search field then it will continue to get used. What Yahoo needs to do is reflect on its company focus. It may well discover that it needs to significantly reposition itself in the market to get improved numbers of users. It might chase the sought after social network market, even though it might be far too demanding to overthrow Facebook. As an alternative, Yahoo might want to develop a new niche area.
Re-imaging it as a utility with several diverse features might possibly be being the solution. Yahoo could provide social bookmarking (to save your bookmarks) and a password store (to save passwords). Along with its My Yahoo service and search engine features, it would cement itself as an online utility and deliver consumers functions not provided by similar sites. These could be the functions that Yahoo must have to climb from the ashes.
