Yahoo is making a return to search | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo is making a return to search

searchengineland.com

131 pointsgeorgehill162 comments

I know it’s easy to throw stones from the outside, but Google’s results are so compromised it seems like it’s a good time to get back in.

As one just example, I searched for a unique error message in code that exists on GitHub, is in a fairly popular repo, and is not new and Google just could not find it. That seems like a very basic failure.

I have the feeling that whatever you're talking about is explicitly not crawlable.

That doesn’t change anything regarding the actual point of the comment.

Your idea for a search competitor is to ignore robots.txt?

or an advertising competitor that ignores DNT!

oh wait

It's a just a text file.

This seems perfectly logical to some people:

Google ignores robots.txt: "Google is evil! They're trespassing on my webserver!"

Google follows robots.txt: "Google search results suck! They're not indexing GitHub!"

Yes, clearly that's the best possible interpretation of what I said. /s

A public git repository is definitely crawlable. Google seems to have given up actively going out of their way to index things that are hard to crawl as they got so big and important it was easier to just tell people "thou must do X or we won't index you and you want to be indexed", but increasingly the content I want to find is in weird little silos.

Yeah, the GitHub robots.txt is surprisingly restrictive:

https://github.com/robots.txt

   User-agent: *

   Disallow: /*/pulse
   Disallow: /*/tree/

That "/*/tree" rule means that search engine crawlers are allowed to hit the README file of a repo but effectively NONE of the other files in it.

Which means that if you keep your project documentation on GitHub in a docs/ folder it won't be indexed!

You need to publish it to a separate site via GitHub Pages, or use https://readthedocs.org/

(Side note: I just noticed https://github.com/ekansa/Open-Context-Data is explicitly listed in the robots.txt for GitHub - the only repo that gets a mention like that. I'd love to know the story behind that!)

That repo apparently used to be the largest on GitHub: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5912922. I bet Google was repeatedly scraping the entire thing and putting too much strain on their servers at the time it was added. It's been 10 years, what are the odds nobody at GitHub today remembers why it was added?

Also, very relatable to see a decade old "I'll update this shortly" comment that was never updated. We all have a few of those.

It appears that the creator of the repo actually confirmed this: https://twitter.com/ekansa/status/1137052076062650368

/*/tree is only for directory listings. File contents will be under a /blob/ path, e.g. https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/main/AUTHORS, and should be, AFAIK, indexable.

(mandatory disclaimer: I'm a GitHub employee, not speaking on behalf of the company)

If they can't hit `/*/tree` is there a way to know the URLs of the files?

Sure, clone the git repo.

GitHub would not be happy with Google cloning all repos, and many of them at a high frequency, in order to circumvent a robots.txt restriction.

They're clever people, they could just do partial updates (pull instead of clone). I doubt it'd be that much of a strain.

Direct links from crawlable pages

I asked about this on the support forum a while ago and never got a satisfactory response: https://github.com/community/community/discussions/20958

There's also two users:

    Disallow: /account-login
    Disallow: /Explodingstuff/

The first for obvious reasons, the second probably because they've uploaded nothing of substance besides a copy of WannaCry.

Curious, if I had the list of repos, is there anything that forbids me from `while read url; do git clone $url data;./train data; rm -rf ./data; done`. Besides licensing, ie ratelimit/throttle, similar question, the search for code across all repos provided by github ui gets throttled pretty fast, what do people do? (not suggestion in a hundred(?) years to do the while loop for this tho ;))

Do you think google cares that it's loosing it's edge? How do they not know it's getting worse.

Yes, I remember several years ago --- more like 8 now(!) --- easily finding results in GitHub repos whenever I've needed to look up error codes and such. Now even site:github.com doesn't (and if you try too hard, you get the hellban for a while).

Another extremely noticeable degradation is in finding part numbers, IC markings, service manuals (NOT the useless user manual), schematics, and the like. Anything that proponents of right-to-repair would be extremely interested in, to the extent that I wonder if there's been some sort of conscious effort being made by certain interests to eliminate or limit such information.

Then there's the niche-but-legal adult content. I won't go into too much detail about that, but suffice to say it used to be far easier to find.

It's been 5 years since this notorious item here, and I've only seen Google get worse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840

Not only have they become compromised from a technical standpoint, for some searches in particular, the results have been modified to be heavily politically biased and woke.

Don’t downvote them until you check out Frank Zappa’s discography.

Sundar Pichai has so Mckinsified and MBAfied Google that at this point Google search seems like an A/B test to deliver the best targeted ad . Probably better of using any other search including Yahoo .

Would you mind providing details like the search query and link to the page you expect to be found?

To test your hypothesis, I did a basic search for exact matches on "we do not synchronize on the update of the broker node" and Google returned 2 search results in 240ms:

- https://github.com/a0x8o/kafka/blob/master/core/src/main/sca...

- https://jar-download.com/artifacts/org.apache.kafka/kafka_2....

Which contain exactly the source code from GitHub that I was looking for. You'll notice that the first result is actually a0x80's fork of apache/kafka. Google states that some entries very similar to the 2 already displayed were omitted, and I'm able to remove that filter. With that filter removed, I can see the same document indexed from apache/kafka on GitHub.

There's nothing I can do or promise directly, but I can assure you that Google takes the quality of our search results very seriously. If you believe we're not delivering quality results, I strongly encourage you to click that "Send Feedback" link at the bottom of your results so that our teams can act upon your feedback.

Disclosure: I work on Search at Google.

Disclaimer: The words, views, and opinions expressed in this post are my own. They are not representative nor do they represent my employer in any capacity.

How often do people use the send feedback button? How many of the reports are looked at?

I’m not authorized to disclose data that’s not public knowledge.

What I can say is that we have a feedback process in place for Google Search that we use to improve our product. You can send feedback and check the box to allow our teams to contact you if you’re interested in a follow up. Of course, given our scale, we’re not able to follow up on every bit of feedback but that doesn’t mean we don’t review or act upon that feedback in some way.

I dont know how common this is, but in my 12 years using this site this is the first time I see a Google employee address a customer regarding a product they work on.

Congrats and hope Google takes advantage of HN, similar to how startups use this forum to engage with users - it is now a meme that Google Search is unusable so there must be something to learn from the audience.

I will use the send feedback button tomorrow as you suggest.

Thank you for the kind words. Long time HN member here like you (going on 11 years) that recently started working on Search as a SWE.

Yes, that meme is very common. I hope I can contribute positively to these discussions by offering an outlet for feedback, and humanizing our organization. Google’s Search organization is large, so it’s certainly not monolithic, but we’re staffed with a bunch of normal, hardworking, genuine human beings like most companies, that care about the impact we’re having.

I’m happy you’ve found some value in our discussion. :)

There are cases where Google doesn't return anything close to all known exact matches.

1. Most large classic forums using vbulletin. Try picking any rare word or phrase with less than 100 total matches via the forum's search tool and compare to the Google verbatim results.

2. This very site, searching for an uncommon word such as "memeplex" returns hundreds of unique results according to hn.algolia.com, but only 65 according to Google via site:news.ycombinator.com "memeplex".

3. Fanfiction sites such as fanfiction.net . Try randomly picking an obscure 'fandom' with only a few hundred stories, and search for the name of one of the main protagonists. It will only retrieves a small fraction of all the existing stories that mention the protagonist's name.

EDIT: I originally had another example involving macrumors.com but then realized there was a formatting mistake in the search query.

Hey Michael, I appreciate the effort you put into describing a few examples:

1. If you could link to specific examples and queries that’d be super helpful for someone like me that’s not active on the forums you’re describing.

2. Algolia is a fuzzy matching search engine. Searching for memeplex [1] returns matches like “megaplex”, “memepher”, “meeples”, etc. Unchecking typo tolerance in the settings returns < 100 results in line with Google’s results.

3. Again, if you could link to specific examples and queries that’d be helpful.

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=19&prefix=true&qu...

Thanks for looking into it Denzel.

I'm not quite sure what you mean for 2., I see every exact match highlighted in a rectangular box in a different color. Do you not see that on your end?

Just counting the exact matches, there are well over 100 unique results.

On the other hand why does one of the richest company on earth, who can afford to hire the smartest people on earth, resort to unpaid volunteers on a site like HN to fix their product?

Don't they use their own tools? Is there an internal search engine that everyone uses at Google? Are they trying to gaslight us pretending there's no problem? Can't they hire a hundred people to use Google search and report what they found?

Sure, props to that person for engaging with the userbase but we're not talking about an obscure bug here. Every day there are dozens of complaints about Google search on HN alone. Surely we're talking about low hanging fruits in terms of bug reproduction.

You should try to assume good faith when engaging with a person who’s just like yourself.

First, we can agree that Google Search is attempting to solve an astronomically hard problem. Like mind boggling hard. Indexing the entire web and serving quality results to unstructured queries from billions of users every day in under one second is no small feat.

Second, Google is not monolithic. We employ more people than most cities have citizens. Furthermore, many more people than our current staff have come and gone over our 20+ year existence. It’s better to think of Google as an organic entity than a rigid command-and-control hierarchy. Are you able to think of a city in the world that does everything perfectly? I certainly can’t, and yet, there are cities that are better and those that are worse for any set of criteria that one may care about. As it is with large companies like Google.

Third, while there’s an objective element to search result quality, there’s also a significant amount of subjectivity. Your idea of quality results may differ from another person’s idea.

Checkout Paul Haahr’s talk on “Improving Search over the Years” [1]. He summarizes our work the best when he says things that look easy on the outside can take a lot of work to implement.

As it was with our state-of-the-art automatic synonym system that works on any written language in our corpus. (More details in his presentation.) This system is a transparent workhorse from the user’s perspective.

Here’s a simple example you can compare between Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo: “united flight formations”.

Two of those search engines will show a bunch of things about United Airlines as top results because that’s what you would expect to get when you’re only focused on matching terms. Only one of those search engines understands the meaning behind the query and returns everything to do with formation flying as the top results.

If you use our products and you mostly enjoy our products, it’s in your best interest to give feedback when you feel we’re not serving your needs. You’ll find that most of products, Search included, have open feedback channels that we do review and act upon.

[1]: https://youtu.be/DeW-9fhvkLM

I'm sure you're a real person deserving of respect and love. If I say that the search results are terrible it's not a comment on your humanity or that if your colleagues. People have genuine problems with Google and a reasonable expectation based on experience that they won't get any joy by trying to appeal to big G. You can say that you're just flesh and blood, but don't discount the well-founded displeasure of users.

> Google states that some entries very similar to the 2 already displayed were omitted, and I'm able to remove that filter.

I've definitely seen that sort of thing before but there is no such link there at the moment -- at least not when searching from my iPhone, whether or not I'm in desktop mode. I just see a large error box that says "It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search" followed by the link to the a0x80 fork.

By the way, the a0x80 result highlights a serious problem with search results: the GitHub URL is strangely modified. Instead of showing the full URL or even a prefix leading up to it Google is selecting parts of the URL, showing "https://github.com > src > transaction" on mobile and "https://github.com > kafka > coordinator > transaction" when I request the desktop site. In neither case is it obvious that the content isn't the canonical source from Apache. I've noticed this middle-out truncation for GH urls before but I'm not sure when it started.

I was just searching for an old friend of mine who's last name happens to be a substring of another common last name. I tried everything, quotes, + signs, - signs, middle initials, middle names, cities we lived in together, etc.

Every single returned link after the first 3 had the superstring version of the name and not the correct name. It turns out that this returns endless results for a fairly well known singer, not my friend.

So now did I not get the results I was looking for, I got tons of results that were objectively wrong.

Then suddenly, about 6 pages into those results, I started getting ones for the correct last name, but now the first name is a mess.

This happened on Google, DDG, Baidu, Sogou, Haosou, Dogpile, the current Yahoo search, Bing, and to some extent on Yandex. Naver was worse, Daum totally worthless with incorrect results.

Utterly worthless.

The thing is, my friend's name is surprisingly fairly unique, there's probably less than 20 people in the world with that specific name. It's like the search engine's desire to fill the screen with worthless garbage results has overpowered the need to supply the 2 or 3 that are actually correct, even if the quantity is a little disappointing.

Try neeva?

Nope, same shitty results.

I've basically decided that my friend's name is going to be my search engine quality test from now on, the results are so spectacularly terrible.

All I want is something the crawl the web, suppress SEO spam, and let me "search" on things exactly as I've quoted them. Like we used to in 1998.

I've found that with Google I have to use verbatim mode to get it to do anything vaguely sensible.

Synonymization is the worst thing to ever happen to search, and it keeps getting more and more aggressive.

I would honestly pay at minimum $10 a month to a search engine startup that focuses on the top 10k, then top 100k Alexa sites, and does good indexing of top sites. If I google something programming related, give me all the stackoverflow you find relevant. I don't even care about image search, that can come later. I think the world has room for a search engine competitor, I'm just not sure what it would look like, but I hope someone is working on something that isn't just a repeat of hot garbage.

Just a suggestion, I'm not a subscriber but am investigating the service: Kagi might come close to that. You can up or down rank sites too boost their visibility in your searches. Would take some time to get going but eventually I think one would end up with a much better and almost curated result set.

Generally though these days I'm trying to distance myself from Google so if anyone has any other search engine suggestions (beyond the usual DDG, Bing, Yandex, Neeva) I'm very open.

I think this is okay so long as you can toggle it off since now you apply userbase bias, which isn't guaranteed to be perfectly neutral, since it is bias in aggregate, anything remotely ideological in nature would be skewed one way or the other.

I do like this idea however.

My understanding of is that it's just for you, not based on what every user of Kagi is choosing. Looking in the settings though I'm not sure if you can disable this feature on an ad hoc basis, which would be useful now and then if you want to get a fresh set of results and get out of your own biases.

Negating some string with a `-` prefix works in my experience. But haven't come across a case with superstrings, can't think of an example to try too.

> but Google’s results are so compromised

I read this constantly here (echo chamber) and I can't help but feel it's a little biased/overdramatic.

Honestly, I'd be all for using ddg exclusively. but I find myself doing !g (their google redirect operator) when I don't find what I want on DDG, and it's almost always the top result on Google. And this happens daily.

Seems like the worst time, unless they're doing so with ChatGPT and the like. What regular search lacks is context and a natural way of refining queries by adding context that doesn't always work well with keywords.

Right now searching on Google is way worse than Yahoo, Altavista or Ask Jeeves.

Now only we get tons of ads back as first results, Google keeps rewriting the queries for whatever "helpful" nonsense.

and it just straight up ignores keywords even when there's matches containing all of them. google has become so much worse, and yes part of it is that there's a ton of spam, which is also a problem, but it has also gotten worse in other respects too

> As one just example, I searched for a unique error message in code that exists on GitHub, is in a fairly popular repo, and is not new and Google just could not find it. That seems like a very basic failure.

I have recently almost completely stopped using Google's search engine due to the fact that I am very often offered zero search results for simple queries (usually involving quotes though) .. It's so bad I can't even believe it.

Note: I've been a Google search since it started... Gmail since Beta, etc...

At one point, I thought that maybe they started punishing ad-block users excessively.

Seems like the giants that were nearly synonymous with "Internet" - Google and Amazon, are rapidly deteriorating and creating a massive market opportunity.

Pure speculation, but innovative companies at first, they started over-hiring and bloating, using questionable interviewing techniques (puzzles, Leetcode), taking on thousands of employees who were just there to game the system, coast, and collect the check.

It just looks like they stopped caring.

Most tech companies have ruined their products now. They’ll have 10,000 engineers and 15 iterations of the UI but you try and buy a hard drive and it’s a box with an SD card taped inside.

It’s time for competitors to start wiping them out.

Why do they even bother with the SD card?

My guess is that there is now so much ml Blackbox shit going on in the search algo that no one can reasonably tell you why it returns what it does.

They should revive their original concept: a web directory. The internet has enough dumb crawlers, the problem I want to see solved is quality and trust.

I tried to start this project before leaving Yahoo. At least in my orbit, no one was interested. I could’ve done a poor job of communicating the idea but there was/is too much churn after the Apollo acquisition.

I think google is actually a web directory or portal masquerading as a search. At least that's how I use it, and I suspect most people do. I generally know the internet sites where I want to get information, and I'm definitely not using google to discover then. Google lets me deep dive to a site and content, saving a step vs going to the site, and probably searching better than a site's native search. Stack Overflow is the archetypal example of this. And Google's pretty good for it, once you learn to dodge some ads and spam. At the same time, the internet is mature, so most people are doing less site discovery and going back to a set of regulars, so the deep link portal model serves people well

Otoh what Google's terrible at is finding new sites with interesting content. If you don't already know where your going, you mostly end up in spam land. I'd like to see a search that addresses that.

Crawlers used to be good for discovering interesting and good content, before the advent of SEO. Now that this model has been compromised, that's why I think a more curated option would be advantageous in today's world. I would love to have a general resource with 1/1000000th the content if the content was consistently high quality. Also, I loved that you could just browse the old Yahoo by category.

SEO existed certainly in the late 90s, and was likely around about 10 seconds after the first SE was created.

I bet GPT-3 let loose to crawl the web could whip up something like the original Yahoo hierarchal, curated directory structure pretty quickly. It wouldn't be as good as employing dozens of people to actually read and rank websites, but it would be a start.

Browsing through directory trees is complimentary to search, and has its own power for surfacing unexpected connections, i.e. information you didn't necessarily know you were looking for. I would love to see something well maintained like that again.

It would certainly be better than the status quo of site ranking.

Asking ChatGPT for websites about a topic does a fairly decent job, it seems. At least, it doesn't give me any spam.

Yet. Give it time and when asked “find me the owners manual for a 2004 jeep wrangler” it will list a few sites, probably one with the pdf in there, and then a few “need a new used car?” links too…

Hah. So true. And it'll direct you to a used car site where all the marketing content was written by... ChatGPT. Then again, replacing used car dealers with Terminators could be an improvement.

Absolutely agree. I loved DMOZ and was a faithful volunteer for several years. Maybe the time has past and it would be too ripe for gaming the system. Finding dedicated volunteers that "stick to the mission" would be the key. Not sure how possible that is in today's world. Back then we didn't really think about providing this free labor to some company. We were just grateful that someone was hosting such a thing and we had the chance to contribute.

I think it'd be fun/cool to start a DMOZ, that basically uses a crawler that runs every page of a site through gpt-3 to get the top 10 categories the site belongs to, and figure a way to basically do what DMOZ did via human editors with ai, it'd still allow for human overrides and suggestions etc, but wouldn't require or rely on it.

Agree. That would also help to discover random interesting things.

The question is if it should be human/user curated, or automatically generated with e.g. some AI.

We are coming in full circle hard. I started using newsletters aggressively - it's a good way to keep on top of your interests.

Mastodon is similar to the old decentralized discussion boards - each server run by its own admins, and specific to a set of narrow topics.

A key detail a lot of people are missing about "traditional" search vs. ChatGPT style search:

ChatGPT/LLMs can essentially crawl _anything_ they want, regardless of legality, license, consent, etc. These models are trained on anything that can be ingested. Once trained, you can release the model with plausible deniability. There's no 1:1 relation between ingested content and outputs. LLMs that "cheat" by ingesting content they shouldn't have will have an advantage over those that don't.

Google and other search engines don't have this luxury. If they serve a result, they have to make sure that they're not violating any license. If they crawl the wrong content, they have to make sure they don't serve it.

This isn't true. Search engines rely on fair use: https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33810.html

Agreed. Sites like GitHub actively monitor for unwanted crawling/scraping and throttle requests.

Google and other search engines also crawl anything they want. If it is accessible on the internet, it is fair game. There have been countless disputes about linking to copyrighted content, posting blurbs etc., and Google has mostly won all of them with the fair use argument.

If Google removed copyrighted content from its index, the results would be Wikipedia and...not much else.

> ChatGPT/LLMs can essentially crawl _anything_ they want, regardless of legality, license, consent, etc. These models are trained on anything that can be ingested. Once trained, you can release the model with plausible deniability

We will see. The idea that ML models contain the mere creative essence and are generative from something that cannot be copyrighted is not one that has been tested in court.

I personally am not convinced: My own experiments with prompt-stuffing GPT definitely seem to reveal corpus.

I am reminded of a story of how billg would type a command into basic computers at trade shows to "reveal" that it contained microsoft-copyrighted code (gotcha!).

I imagine if someone did that in front of a judge it would be game-over.

All they need to do is make a search engine that brings back google results a la the mid 2000s and a mechanism for users to punish those annoying formulaic crap blogs. Google search has become so functionally useless I have to use multiple services and bloody yandex to get a good idea of my results.

how would the whole SEO factor into all of this new search order?

suppose chatGPT or whatever is taught to ignore SEO, those people will fight tooth and nail to be relevant and keep their jobs of pushing users towards the content THEY want....

will these new search engines reject/punish/hurt SEO? what will happen to that industry?

Good question and not to sound like an ass but that's not our problem and more an SEO one.

Which in my opinion is a good thing.

Yeah, search results are getting worse and worse. I kinda learned to live with it by subconsciously already knowing what links not to click... But as a new user it must be horrible to get flooded with trash (if they even notice :/)

uBlacklist helps remove some of those links, particularly Pinterest and StackOverflow clones.

Heros sometimes don't wear caps. Thanks mate.

I hadn’t kept up with the current state of Yahoo after Verizon, but I guess they’re owned by Apollo now? Also they’re merged with AOL and Netscape? lmao

Like a Frankenstein monster made out of the decrepit remains of dotcom juggernauts. I love it.

AOL has been "merged with Netscape" for nearly two decades now and the Netscape team has been laid off nearly a decade, so it's a weird example to pick.

Bolt on a tab called “community” that links to the corpse of MySpace and call it a day.

And for some reason they still run att.net email, and its a complete clusterfuck.

Yahoo Search has never gone away entirely, but just been powered by Bing under the hood for a while now. The author seems very passionate about the topic but failed to mention this key context in the article. "Making a return" could mean anything from ending their partnership with Microsoft and creating a new search engine from scratch to just giving their existing experience a small face lift. Knowing the state of Yahoo right now, I'd be very comfortable betting on the latter outcome. Doubly so because Bing has exclusive rights to ChatGPT for search, so their results are likely getting a lot better soon.

I googled how to turn pie crust into cookie dough today and nothing but those awful SEO recipe blogs. I really miss when search results were authentic content.

Punchfork (https://www.punchfork.com/) is a good micro search engine for recipes.

New York Tines has a great recipes site! https://cooking.nytimes.com/search?q=Pie

I wish Yahoo would bring back Yahoo Games. I miss the days when I would waste time playing Spades, Hearts and Yahoo pool

Yahoo games was the best when I was a kid. Lot of fun games and chats with weirdos

Yahoo pipes

You can play Spades and Hearts (and hundreds of other board games) on BoardGameArena. Plenty of games you can join there. Not quite the same experience, but in some ways it's a lot better.

They don't have action games like pool on there, though.

With advent of really clever bots, which I think weren't that good back then, this won't be the same experience as it use be. I have only played pool back then and it was fun.

Now there is just so much of everything we use to enjoy with a sense of curiosity. It's all very similar to growing up. You don't and mostly can't fancy your childhood toys the same way anymore.

You can never go home.

And even if you find a way in, the new owners start screaming and yelling.

<3 yahoo pool. Wasted a lot of time on that in high school.

I was in a pool league in my 20s, pool101, there were a ton of crackers in the league cracking yahoo rares (names that couldn't be made anymore because of character restrictions), some people sold these for like 10k or more per name, which is crazy because Yahoo could and did get rid of names from time to time, it wasn't like a domain name.

It was fantastic. Play against actual humans under their own screen names. Integrated chat. Chess was great. I think the guy that developed them now runs a non profit and also works with louis rossmann on right to repair stuff.

If Yahoo didn't suck so bad at email, I would be excited about this.

If they can't fix something they already have, I doubt they would be able to win my trust with search.

What’s wrong with yahoo mail? I’ve been using free version since day one and I think it’s solid? Their spam filter is not great though.

99.9% of all email in existence is spam so "Their spam filter is not great though" sounds like a pretty big deal to me

they still filter most spam, not as well as google though

It’s good once it’s trained, something you don’t need to do with Gmail

Unless they manage to somehow bring back the early Yahoo hacker culture they don't stand a chance. The track record is that nothing interesting came out of Yahoo in the last 10 years so I don't know why these kind of people would suddenly want to work there.

Looking for a product manager for this enormous undertaking by posting a job offer is quite telling already.

Let's hope that I'm wrong.

I think they are such underdog that I don’t think it will have problem attracting strong talent working on competitive search product

Huh.

I wonder. Now is the time to pick up a whole slew of ex-googlers.

(And aren't non-competes illegal in California, too?)

It would be funny if Google is just so full of itself, that it lets its search slide to uselessness, then fires skilled devs re: search, and yahoo snags them up.

edit:

You know, something is just really dysfunctional at google. I almost think a government forced breakup would help them.

If they do, they should rename it Akebono

Bring back AltaVista

Bring back astalavista

Make AltaVista Great Again

I wonder if they'll just slap their brand name on DuckDuckGo or You.com and try to use their legacy recognizability to a large audience to get traction.

that'd be a big fail for ddg, it's just reskinned Google, but you is unique enough it could fit, or they could just acquire kagi and make it free, or maybe kagi creates a licensible way for others to use their API and use an ad based way to make search free for those with less concern over privacy and more concern for good search results.

Wikipedia says Yahoo has ~7B revenue in 2020. Has no idea they were still making that much money. Should we assume it’s about the same currently?

I find yahoo finance blasts the pants off of google's variant.

Does their fantasy sports bring in anything I wonder? I've found it to be good enough.

Yahoo Finance has a strong older generation core audience and the product itself is actually quite good for the data it provides freely.

When I was working as an in-house legal counsel at Yahoo! France (circa 2009), most of the revenues in Europe were from the advertising network activities. They had the biggest media brands in their inventory at that time. They also insisted that they were mainly an ad network, not a search engine nor a news portal. This was really unexpected when I joined.

They've downloaded the Yandex leak and they finally figured out how to do search?

(sorry for that joke :P)

I understand Yahoo pays quite well, so that should help.

Is search being commoditized by CharGPT?

I think search is about to become a big expensive meat grinder, extremely competitive. The good news is that everybody who was just laid off by BigTechCos is likely about to get rehired at a premium—they are going to need lots of hands to build their competing products.

search.yahoo.com never went away.

They're using Bing to power their results, and have been since 2009. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search

(I used to work at a company that "made" search engines).

Almost every search engine on the market is either Google results or Bing results repackaged.

Fun fact: because of legacy contracts, some search engines use results from a Yahoo feed, which in turn are just Bing's results. DuckDuckGo was one of them, they were paying Yahoo, who was paying Bing. The last I checked (3 years ago) they struck a deal with Bing directly.

The company I used to work for would often work out deals where we'd resell search engine results to other search engines too... Very interesting world.

>We are looking for folks that are interested in pushing beyond the status quo to change the way folks interact and use search.

I must have missed the memo on this, but when did “people” become an unacceptable word in corporate communications?

It's discriminatory against unpersons

And me. I self-identify as a crustacean.

Ever since the finding of uncleftish beholding.

Folks is a synonym for people. You’re welcome.

When Human Resources became a thing.

I think it's so we don't offend some of the lizard "folks" who work in tech with us.

238 job postings at Yahoo use the word "people"

3 use the word "folks"

This makes sense when you understand that "the woke" use language to separate the in-group from the out-group. "Folks" is not a new word, but an old one that has been reclaimed by social justice, queer and academic communities. Many other words that have been redefined or repurposed now form a sub-language of English used to distinguish "the woke" from "the non-woke".

This distinction is often unconscious and absorbed through immersion in social justice circles, similar to how luxury beliefs (such as "defund the police," "trans women are women," etc https://nypost.com/2019/08/17/luxury-beliefs-are-the-latest-...) are absorbed.

You have to use that kind of language to signal your belonging to the "elites", and the HR departments that usually write job ads or staff Twitter accounts are full of those type of people. From that it's just propagated everywhere else.

Edit: Congratulation HN on your brilliant policy that prevents me from responding to any of the comments under my post (looks like I got throttled, so editing the post is the only thing I can now do).

What in the fuck is this word salad?

I am sorry, I am not a native English speaker, do you have a hard time understanding any particular part of what I wrote? I am happy to expand.

"So what often happens in political discussions on HN is 1) a person, such as yourself, posts dissenting views in response to several messages, 2) those messages are heavily downvoted by a brigade of users, 3) the person's account is rate-limited or shadowbanned, 4) the brigade freely posts comments against the dissenter because, being many users, each only posting one or two messages, and being of the censorious brigade (the dissenters usually oppose censorship and don't downvote for disagreement--see how even one GitHub user couldn't resist drive-by down-thumbing your comment), their comments don't get downvoted, so they don't get rate-limited.

The end result is, very predictably, a form of mob censorship. And since HN approves of downvoting for disagreement, nothing is done to stop it." https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues...

Sometimes people like to say "this is nonsense" to mean they don't like something.

Though for wokeness, you also run into supporters who say it "doesn't exist", by which they mean it's good (in a "it's just common sense" way).

Define “wokeness”.

I don't need to; that's not how language works. But for foreign readers let's say "the name of a US political tendency".

Also, my post wasn't a criticism of it and I don't even disagree with it (fcvo "it").

Whether you agree with it or not, it isn't word salad. In fact, it is quite well written.

Except as a sibling poster points out, for every 1 job posting using the word folk, there are about 80 using the word people.

So really it’s the anti-“woke” crowd are unable to look at anything without feeling oppressed by the “woke”.

> "Folks" is not a new word, but an old one that has been reclaimed by social justice, queer and academic communities.

I'm from the south, in the US. Folks is just another way to say people. End of story. The people I've heard use the term "folks" are kind older people with a thick southern drawl. I also hear corporate managers use the term to refer to a group of people. I also hear young adults use it to refer to a group of people...

On second thought, I don't think someone using the term "folks" has ever been used to signal anything more than them referring to a group of people. (Also, I feel like I should mention I'm conservative, and it has never crossed my mind to think somebody using the word folks is "woke" or "antiwoke")

It is absolutely correct that the word is still alive and well in the south of the US. But the issue we are discussing is about it being re-appropriated by the HR departments and the social justice "folks" and that is a process that absolutely happens.

https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-folks/

or my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34589768

I think you need to really begin to critically question your sources. Every single link on that source you posted links to other articles on the same website. Talk about circular logic. At the end of the article, they finally show the actual quotes using the term "folks", and there's absolutely nothing nefarious or any sort of hidden meaning in the usage. This whole argument is grasping at non-existent straws.

Once again, that website has nothing of substance. It pulled a couple random quotes from "woke" literature that used the word folks and then made a grand conspiracy about how there's some sort of secret meaning behind the term. The term "folks" is still alive and well everywhere and has no double meaning associated with it whatsoever. What you're doing here is equivalent to what the "woke" did by trying to convince people the OK symbol really means you're a white supremacist[0]. Both of these are delusions, in every sense of the word.

One last thing, if anyone ever tries to convince you there's a grand conspiracy at the top echelons of society, where the elites are actively doing this one thing to control the masses, they're probably deluded. Hanlon's razor typically applies in these cases: never apply to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

[0]: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/26/764728163/the-ok-hand-gesture...

That's what I associate the word with too, as well as the phrase "howdy folks" --- it's very typical of southern US English and has basically no political connotation.

What is a "luxury belief" exactly?

There is a link in the comment that explains just that to be honest. But here is a better source: https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/status-symbols-and-the-...

Thanks. So yeah what parent wrote about "trans women being women" being a luxury belief is nonsense. How would it "inflict costs on the lower class"?

This belief, when realized upon women's prisons, which house mostly working-class women, ends up with males being incarcerated in such prisons, with predictable results: sexual assault, rape, impregnation - and a pervasive fear of all these being inflicted. A terrible cost for imprisoned women to bear, in the name of inclusivity.

> This belief, when realized upon women's prisons, which house mostly working-class women, ends up with males being incarcerated in such prisons, with predictable results: sexual assault, rape, impregnation - and a pervasive fear of all these being inflicted. A terrible cost for imprisoned women to bear, in the name of inclusivity.

> ends up with males being incarcerated in such prisons

Well, no, those are women. The myth that men use inclusivity to get access to women is just that, a myth, unless you can provide evidence that this is really a common occurence. Obviously violence in prisons needs to be avoided but that's a different topic.

There have been numerous cases where female inmates have been raped or impregnated by males incarcerated alongside them in women's prisons. This alone should make it obvious that these men are not women.

Do you have a source how much of a problem this is, I'm not finding anything reliable.

Takes away from athletic scholarships, academic scholarships, etc. that are designed for biological women.

"Luxury belief" is a thing you can believe because you are rich enough to avoid being presented with counter-evidence.

So let me get this straight. You want to cancel the word “folks” from modern usage?

"We tortured some folks" [0] sounds better than "your tax dollars went to extrajudicial torture of human beings".

[0] The quote is either Bush, Jr. or Obama.

I actually like seeing "folks" come back in regular use. Folks is the indigenous Anglo-Saxon word (cognate German "volk") vs the Romance language "people" and "person". It sounds less snooty or intellectual. It's simple and clean.

Oh... And I can't for the life of me imagine how it could be interpreted as more "woke". In fact here in Canada it's kind of a phrase used more by the "right" than the "left"; (it's actually a source of much humour how much this word is overused by Ontario's right wing hockey enforcer barely high school educated 'populist' premier)

https://www.torontostandard.com/the-sprawl/doug-ford-gets/

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