Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

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You can bypass the paywall with this link: http://bit.ly/1XdzZgO (Google search the original URL in quotes in future)

Sounds like she's in a tough spot. You're pretty much forced into a situation of focusing on the good numbers when you're a public company or you'll get beaten up by the shareholders and shorts. So it's difficult to shine sunlight on the bad stuff to disinfect because that's not what public investors want to hear.

Going into search? That's just crazy talk. Google has the space completely wrapped up.

I think Yahoo has some excellent properties like finance.yahoo.com which is amazing and could unlock a deluge of cash with the right biz model. Retail investors visit the site in droves daily. Right now it's an advertising disaster. Prime space taken up by spammy link-baity ads injected into the main center content: "10 most popular fitness models on the planet". And prime spaces on the right taken up by amazon ads. The most targeted ads by etrade, scottrade and ameritrade are the smallest ads on the page with tiny icons on the left. They relaunched yahoo finance in September and sounds like their users hate the new site: https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/315477-finance-dd-3

The WSJ article isn't going to make life at Yahoo any easier unfortunately.

You can also bypass the paywall by clicking the 'web' link under the post title on HN.

I am not new at all to HN and never knew this, cool :)

It was added a couple of months ago.

THANK YOU. WSJ is the one site I see regularly linked that has such an intrusive paywall, and I've previously avoided them entirely for this reason. No "10 free articles", no interstitials. Just blocked.

Saying that Google has search wrapped up today is about like saying that BlackBerry had the smartphone market wrapped up in 2007.

The space is ripe for upheaval.

Where exactly do you see search going that Google isn't already super invested in (NLP, speech recognition, Google Now integration)?

Here's a thought:

There's a field where Google has been doing slightly worse as time goes by: questionable search. It's a running joke by now that Bing's video search is much better for searching porn that Youtube. Similarly, searching for "<band> full album mp3 download" on Google is bound to return useless websites. Sometimes the actual results are to be found inside the text of a DMCA takedown notice, meaning that Google has the result, but refuses to show it to you.

And speaking of bad results, some specific terms (such as moving companies) are so full of SEO garbage that there's no way to get a reliable result.

There's definitely room for competition - otherwise, DuckDuckGo would have been out of business by now.

Really? The thing is with stuff like SnapChat, Facebook and Tumblr, I find myself actually using less and less of any web search. The only thing I search for is programming related questions. Nowadays I go directly to Stackoverflow.

it sounds like Google is doubling down on search - a very natural thing for a BigCo to double down on what they already have success in - while missing on "discovery"/"guidance"/"curation".

What about search going social. It seems to me that I find a lot of my information on the social media now like Facebook. It just seems like i search a lot less now than i used to. Its not that people search on social media. I get fed information relentlessly and i have little time or energy left to google anything.

Google's lead and "special sauce" seems to be much deeper than that, though. Unless you can think of a way to do better search without AI, how do you compete?

We're not talking about handset A vs. B. The technical and talent lead is much deeper wrt. Google and Machine Learning.

That really depends on what the upheaval is. Apple didn't make a better version of a black berry, it made an iPhone. I think Google is probably safe for a while, but it's hard to see seismic shifts coming.

Thank you, TBH I realize I should of investigated before commenting. Sorry. I am new to HN, bad manners will be corrected. I guarantee that.

Welcome to HN!

If you haven't yet, check out the bottom of the page, in particular "Guidelines", "FAQ" and the search bar. Also, helpful formatting tips:

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

> bad manners will be corrected. I guarantee that.

We'll hold you to your words. Do so, or the downvotes will follow. ;).

> They relaunched yahoo finance in September and sounds like their users hate the new site

Wha?? I use it daily for the last 10+ years - I despise it, but for some reason there's nothing better afaik. And it would be so easy to make it so much better, no surprise the company is failing.

I don't think Google has wrapped up the search space but Yahoo's search has been laughable for so long now that they would struggle to take on search under the Yahoo brand.

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