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Comment by jay-barronville | Hacker News Reader

Folks, please keep in mind that everyone doesn’t live in America. Yahoo may seem like old news for many of us Americans, but across the world, for many millions of folks, Yahoo is still a significant and well-known brand/website.

E.g., I’m originally from Haiti. A really huge percentage of Haitians still use Yahoo for their email (specifically via yahoo.fr) and they even get a lot of their global news via Yahoo. I’ve seen the same thing apply in various African countries.

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Anecdotally (and being a European) I was mildly surprised that Yahoo still exists.

I've found their financial page to be one of the best free offerings around. Some of the data and its update frequency are additional monthly fees with my brokerage.

Now if only i could convince it to go to https://finance.yahoo.com/ instead of https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/ when in the office it'd be great.

How do you feel it compares to https://www.google.com/finance/ ?

I honestly thought they had shut down this. Maybe they just closed the Api?

I remember having a made up portfolio on Google finance where I pretended to invest money in the stock market by pretending to buy a d sell shares and record my performance.

It was terrible I lost a lot of imaginary money. Made me realize I'm not good at picking stocks. Anyway the point is that portfolio no longer exists on Google Finance. I think they rewrote the code behind Google finance at least twice.

I was unaware this existed but when comparing a ticker on both platforms Yahoo offers a lot more information and metrics, it's nice that there's no click bait news articles being shown for every ticker you look up on Google Finance though.

Google Finance is a much nicer looking product in terms of design, but the data it has is pretty weak.

Yahoo Finance has much more detailed financials for a whole bunch of asset classes. For ETFs it has detailed performance data. For equities, you can get (and download) data on stuff like dividend history, stock splits.

Just see for yourself. Pick a few assets and compare. It's night and day how much more detailed YF data is. The only real thing that GF has going for it is in Google Sheets you can put =GOOGLEFINANCE("symbol") and get the current price of that asset (you can also give it a second argument for other attributes, but the data on offer is pretty limited compared to YF).

Google finance used to be great and then it went to crap. Yahoo stayed the same. Also let's you export historical prices.

It is unbelievable what they did to it, I can’t fathom a reason.

> It is unbelievable what they did to it, I can’t fathom a reason.

Was it one of those "We NEED to update the UI for $CURRENT_YEAR fashions!," that drops half the features for "simplicity"?

Look at it on way back archive and yes.

Things (generally) sell better when made for a 6th grade level.

Google Finance looks nicer on the surface, but doesn't have nearly as much data. It doesn't have options for example. I feel like Google had a great opportunity with finance and let it wither like so many other things.

No, it did not just wither, it was actively sabotaged for my use cases by removing data I used to use. It happened overnight with a redesign.

Agreed; Yahoo Finance is the one Yahoo property I've used consistently forever.

Yeah it's still incredibly good. I like Ycharts too but that's not free.

> Yahoo Finance is the one Yahoo property I've used consistently forever.

Same here! I'm using it from the last 16-17 years almost every weekday and sunday nights. Tried Google finance but I could not get hooked to it.

Yahoo Finance is the easiest way for individual investors to download historical securities prices for doing their own quantitative analysis.

Yes! Back in the day (around 2012-2015) I did a bunch of regressions in R using YF data to land on my target portfolio value tilt. Certainly not something anyone has to do, but interesting for a finance nerd.

Oh man. I forgot about Yahoo Finance. We had a class project in Econ in college circa 2005 that involved making market predictions based on Yahoo Finance with a couple points of your grade based on how well you did.

As I recall I did pretty well in the short term.

I used Yahoo about twice. Then, a couple of months later, I tried this new thing called google and I don't remember visiting Yahoo again. So I'm equally surprised that they still exist after all those years.

Last time I checked, Yahoo was using another search engine to power their results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search

So for many years, there hasn’t been any compelling reason for me to use Yahoo for search

Yahoo is also doing very well in Japan

2 of my family members are still using Yahoo. I haven’t heard any issues from them for several years. Compared to Gmail which you can expect a downtime any month from now.

Wasn't Yahoo Japan always the Yahoo branch?

Like incredibly deeply ingrained in online life on the Japanese.

Yahoo Japan is a separate entity owned by z holdings.

"Yahoo! Japan" is a different company altogether from this Yahoo though. They were founded by the original Yahoo! and SoftBank. After the original Yahoo was mostly acquired by Verizon, the remains of it were spun into a company of its own "Altaba", which was later acquired by SoftBank and then made a part of Z-Holdings a joint venture of SoftBank and the Korean Naver Corporation. And just recently it was announced that the individual companies of Z-Holdings will be merged into one big company. The Japanese internet business is quite the rabbit hole! (Disclaimer, I work for LINE Corp, another subsidiary of Z-Holdings)

Cool you work for LINE. I quite enjoyed going through the wiki for Z Holdings

yahoo.com is the #9 on most visited site and yahoo japan is #16.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_websites

Anecdotally, I still use finance.yahoo.com because it's one of the best free sites out there for financial data. I also use fantasy.yahoo.com for some fantasy sports leagues I'm in.

For those unaware, Yahoo Japan is a separate company, with a somewhat parallel history.

It was a joint venture owned 50% by SoftBank. It went public as a separate company, and in 2018 took back all its ownership from the former Yahoo. In 2021, it merged with Line (also owned by SoftBank,) and bought the Japanese Trademark to Yahoo.

https://www.yahoo.co.jp/ https://www.yahoo.com/

I believe they are still #2 in Japan

Wait what? I thought Yahoo was an American thing. Having lived in Russia, then in Germany I haven't used it once

I heard it's also very popular in Japan.

Yes, but Yahoo Japan is a completely separate entity.

Fax machines are also still big in Japan.

https://www.insider.com/japan-cant-get-rid-the-fax-machine-o...

And floppies.

And your doctor’s office…

It also sucks too.

I got the style but not the grace

I got the clothes but not the face

I got the bread but not the butter

I got the window but not the shutter

But I'm big in Japan

Yahoo is also the homepage for millions of seniors who don't know how to change it, so there's that too.

Or who choose not to change it. Not everyone who has different preferences than you is incompetent.

Who said anything about incompetence? Not me, that was you

"who don't know how to change it"

Have you ever watched an elderly person open an internet browser? This isn't rocket science homie

I'm using yahoo webmail for a secondary account. It's pretty mediocre now but good enough for a rarely used address. It used to be quite good though, basic but solid I would say, until they started "improving" the user interface some years ago.

+1 My dad uses yahoomail too. My mom (hardly)uses Gmail. The difference, my dad started using internet when Yahoo was popular and I got my mom an android phone. He loves Yahoo mail and its good enough and there is no reason to switch.

I still find Yahoo finance the best in class since google finance upgraded itself out of usability a while back - admittedly, I haven't tried many alternatives.

MSN Money is a good alternative imo

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money

Would that not make yahoo more valuable from a future growth perspective. The market in the west is pretty maxed out.

Same in the US really. It’s so excruciating to change email addresses for many people, Yahoo email is still rockin’ pretty hard.

It’ll be nice when we have portable e-mail addresses. Having a phone number that moves with me is really convenient.

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