Yahoo tops Google in US traffic | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

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177 pointszher149 comments

I "Google" less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap. They are mostly best for "big name" items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well.

These days, I'm fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page.

Whatever you are and aren't doing about it, Google, whenever I search for something detailed that's not in StackOverflow, your results are increasingly crap, once again. Pages and pages full of very spammy results.

Some time ago -- perhaps a few years ago or a bit more -- I became accustomed to fairly quickly paging several pages into the search results, where the heaviest, highly ranked spam would start to filter out and I could start to recognize more legitimate sources of information. These days... the spam results just go on and one. If there's quality somewhere in the search results, it's beyond the limit of my patience to continue paging forward and scanning.

Not that I'm using Yahoo, in preference. That part... all I can think of is measuring by byte counts, and buttloads of banner ads. Probably not the right explanation, but...

P.S. Your (Google, again) elimination of the + operator in your search queries was, again anecdotally, another factor in the declining performance of your searches for me. Being able to tell the query engine that I definitely don't want to see results that don't include term x frequently proved quite useful. Now... the damned thing shows me "whatever it feels like", whether I quote terms, beg,.... any other suggestions?

P.S. Your (Google, again) elimination of the + operator in your search queries was, again anecdotally, another factor in the declining performance of your searches for me.

+1 to that. At the least Google should have added a ++ operator to replace the co-opted +.

"Quote" the search term. That's the replacement for +.

Yes, but it's a PITA.

Yep. That adds more keystrokes to optimize a query that didn't give the best results the first time.

It'd be nice if there were an option to revert the behavior.

I'm not sure if my memory is playing tricks on my, but I've found quotes unreliable. Google will spit out "close" suggestions that have nothing to do with what I requested, despite using quotes.

Google also happily returns results which do not fulfill even the "close" suggestions: e.g. I ask for three words, Google searches for those three words, and returns a bunch of pages that contain only two or one of those words. Google, that's not what I asked for.

Google's attempts to tweak my queries and also return results that don't fulfill all requirements makes it much less useful to me, because they usually backfire. I don't want my queries tweaked -- I want exactly what I asked for, and only what I asked for. If I made a mistake, I can figure it out and fix it myself.

> I'm not sure if my memory is playing tricks on my, but I've found quotes unreliable. Google will spit out "close" suggestions that have nothing to do with what I requested, despite using quotes.

I noticed the same a few months ago. If you want an exact match you have to click on "Search tools" >> "All results" >> "Verbatim".

For what it's worth, I assure you that putting a "query" "term" in "quotes" is identical to the retired +plus +sign +operator.

I would be very curious, if you set up Verbatim search as your default search engine in your browser, how often you have to "fix" it, and if you ever find it easier to see what Google makes of your non-verbatim query. I'd especially be interested in how often the thing you're searching for doesn't really exist on the web, and so Google is replacing "no results" with "off-topic results."

"Quote" does not work these days, it still presents results you with alternatives to the "Quote".

You need to use "verbatim" mode. It's under "Search tools" and then in the dropdown starting with "All results".

This applies to the whole query, so there's not really any analogue to "foo bar +baz".

Oh so that's what this "verbatim" thing is, I'll look into it thanks.

I think the only time that Google changes a word in quotes is if the spelling algorithm is very confident. For example, if you searched for [barack obama "autobiolgraphy"], you are going to get results for "autobiography" with the option to really search for "autobiolgraphy".

Other than that, I'm pretty sure that a word in "quotes" must appear in the result to be retrieved, without any alternatives. If you have a counter-example, I would love to see it! (I work on that code.)

No, the replacement is Search Tools --> Verbatim

I actually find Google's higher weighting of StackOverflow results annoying. I've recently been experimenting with a new iOS project, and whenever I search for something Objective-C or iOS SDK related, the first few results are SO questions. In some cases this is useful, but for many queries you really just want the canonical explanation from Apple's docs, not a bunch of people discussing an issue that happens to include those keywords.

SO is more useful when you have a problem that you're trying to debug, and official docs are more useful when you're trying to understand new concepts. Unfortunately Google doesn't allow any way to differentiate between these modes.

Well that's a very simple problem to fix, the "-" operator still works, so you can exclude stackoverflow easily, or use the "site:" operator to force the result to come from apple.

You can even setup those parameters as custom search engines in Chrome so you don't have to repeat yourself every time.

True, although I think this is something that I shouldn't have to manually specify.

How would you propose they should differentiate?

Interesting question. One possibility is a heuristic to determine whether the user is looking for a broad overview or trying to solve a specific problem. For example, "2d arrays in Objective C" should bring up a doc page or a tutorial page that provides an overview of the concept; but "How to initialize a 2D array in Objective C" could provide an SO page where someone has asked exactly that. In general, the narrower the query, the more likely it should be that a forum or other UGC site will provide a better answer than an overview page, because someone else has likely run into the problem before.

There are some of us who don't use 'how', 'why', 'where', 'when' as a carry over from the older days when such terms used to just be ignored. So your example would be searched as "initialize 2d array objective-c".

I felt a bit like you until I added a "goodgle" search engine in my chrome, basically forcing Verbatim at each Google search (appending &tbs=li:1), and forcing English to be the base language, instead of whatever country I am finding myself in at the moment. Then, I tweaked the results by manually ignoring a couple domains, and now, Google is sort of usable again for my personal taste.

Unlike you though, spam (at least recently) has not been a very strong issue of mine. If I had to name one, I'd say that "personalization" of the results was the worst offender to the quality my search results, and the positive thing is that we can turn that one off.

As crazy as it sounds, I wish another good search engine comes, as Google feels more and more like the "least bad" option, rather than the "good" one to me, and I'm just talking about search results, voluntarily excluding privacy & other topics from the debate.

Oops, I can't edit my post anymore, but I wanted to add a little tip for Firefox users (as it is very good now), this addon[1] adds a search engine that does exactly what I do with my custom engine in Chrome.

Funny thing, I did not make this myself, which shows me clearly that I am not the only one feeling this way.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-1/?src...

Good lord, this is perfect. I had no idea about the verbatim setting. All I'd do was use the hl=en and q=%s. This new parameter is practically god-sent.

Thanks.

Last time I recall using a "least bad" search engine was when I was using Altavista. (before I started considering Google "least bad", I mean)

To some extent, I hope they're able to maintain their position. If Google were unseated, I would miss the big, audacious side-projects that they undertake.

Very true, glad I'm not the only one to have noticed this. And I've got a suggestion for a search engine so intelligent - well relatively - it took google back to school and enrolled it in kindergarten. I find myself using it whenever Google gets stumped; it consistently gives better results in the sense that I feel it has a better understanding of my query. Take this example that prompted my above semi-hyperbole. Background:

Four days ago, while walking around outside I saw an insect. Normally this is nothing to write home about except that I had originally mistaken this insect for an assorted clump of debris. So you can imagine my surprise when not only did it start moving, it did so with gusto, scaling walls and what not. Strangest thing I've ever seen. So I thought I'd check Google to find out what manner of sorcery this was. I expected nothing of course - I had no clue where to start. Search term: "insect with a bunch of junk attached to it".

Google Result: http://i.imgur.com/FGIInog.png?1 vs. Other Search Engine Result: http://i.imgur.com/t8ei8dX.png?1

What I sought was the debris carrying lacewing larvae. Result 2 is far off but I was so happy to put a name to the entity I did not even register that result.

The first thing you will notice is Google trying way too hard and ending up with idiotic suggestions as a result. It seems to use the words and their synonyms without accounting for context. That is the only way it could possibly give PHP, email and bugzilla reports as possible answers to that query [1]. It's a common recent pattern I've been noticing, unless I can model how I think people will write about what I'm searching for and more importantly it is not something the SEO people have motive to polish so vigorously, the content is accidently removed; I won't get good results. That SEO bit is annoying because I remember when my previous searches in the genre (e.g. game related) used to be far more fruitful. The new behavior of adding synonyms is particularly not worth it since the fails are much more spectacular than it wins.

Final stuff: I also compare bing, duck duck go and blekko results whenever I hit queries I think are complicated, none do much better than google. Sometimes they are worse. This result is the first time Samuru blew everyone out of the water, usually it is modestly better [2] (answer in second half vs not so for others [3]). The reason I still use google is force of habit, it took over chrome and most importantly: its incredible and unmatched indexing ability. But I use samuru enough that it's one of my most visited pages.

I have absolutely no affiliation with them, don't know who it's by and found out about it here on HN. According to Paul Graham, Google can be tackled if they can get 10,000 hackers on their side. Time to put the hypothesis to the test, +1 here.

[1] Here is the same search with quotes: http://imgur.com/qiGDnqr&t8ei8dX#0

[3] I only sometimes check page 2 for the others. This might seem unfair but a key UX concept is to minimize latency. Clicking to page 2 seems minor but the EV for that action is so low I skip it. But scrolling just a bit more since I'm already here is much cheaper. UX should absolutely count as much as tech (UX/process + human + algorithms > all).

[2] My annoyance with such vague anecdotes is why I decided to start taking screenshots. And also because results are not stable. For example, search terms that bing once did well on are now embarrassing.

You're definitely not the only one to have noticed this. Microsoft has been trying to get the EU to force Google to continue to rank the spam highly, under the pretext that fake "shopping" and "review" sites and shitty "vertical search engines" that can't actually find anything and get all their traffic through SEO are competitors to Google and deranking them is anti-competitive.

Dude, your ignorance is showing. Europe is trying to stop Google pushing its own above everything else, which is VERY different.

It's up to Google whether to rank spam or genuine good sites highly.

Right now it's either vertical searches or spam most of time.

http://www.bing.com/search?setmkt=en-US&q=%2Binsect+with+a+b...

Never heard of samuru so I tried to google:

samuru search engine

The "samuru.com" did not come up on first five pages. Then it starts suggesting samurai.

Contrary, searching

duck duck go search engine

has the https://duckduckgo.com/ as the first result.

Did you try http://www.google.com/search?q=samuru ?

https://www.google.com/search?q=samuru+search+engine

16 hours makes quite a difference, evidently ...

Now Google's entire first page is results about the Samuru search engine, starting with a press release by Stremor announcing their new search engine and touting its use of "language heuristics".

Interesting. "Samuru" brought it right up, but putting it in context "Samuru search engine" brought up tangential, secondary information, i.e., stories about samuru.

Works fine for me on both counts.

That's a great example for the search quality team. What's interesting is the synonym "insect"="bug". Note that the result you like is whatsthatBUG.com, which actually contains no instances of the original query term "insect" and only two isolated side navigation instances of "insects".

Yet it seems like the synonym "bug" on Google, plus the other terms like "junk" and "attached", leads to complaints about software.

In a way, you were lucky that the whatsthatbug.com result actually had the word "junk" and "attached". The letter-writer was using the word "junk" in the same meaning you were, but they were using "attached" in the phrase "see attached pics", whereas you were referring to the debris attached to the insect's back.

We're working hard on improving these kinds of challenging queries. I'm going to be remembering the insect with junk attached to its back for a while!

> I "Google" less and less for search results

Google is absolutely unusable for some search terms that are not part of the primary association of the term. Try searching for "caravan" in a query not related to buying caravans, or caravan holiday parks (I was searching for a particular book that featured a caravan). If I don't mention the word "buy" or "holiday" I would not expect to see either.

> Try searching for "caravan" in a query not related to buying caravans, or caravan holiday parks (I was searching for a particular book that featured a caravan)

http://m.bitraf.no/~mortehu/skrot/caravan_book.png

It even shows the cover of several books featuring a caravan.

Google engineer here.

We run experiments that show ranking improvements before launching changes to how we interpret query words. I would guess that for every time you notice Google "ignoring the word you asked for," there were several times where we got you the right result even though it didn't have the exact words you asked for, and you didn't even notice. We're not perfect but we're always working on improvements.

We also added "Verbatim Mode" to save you the trouble of putting "each" "query" "term" in "quotes" when you want to exactly match all your query words.

Thanks ^_^ personally I like the results I get.

I would very much like an expandable section below the search text where I could turn very specific portions of the google magic on and off.

I also wish you would remove the multitude of sites that scrape content from the original sites and SEO the hell out of it to get to the top of search results. I assume the advertising revenue is too lucrative to do so.

I haven't had too many issues with Google guessing what I mean but the sites that scrape other sites are a real pain. find the oldest page with that text and show it to me, then exclude the rest from the results. Or something like that. If it has the exact same information then it's useless to me.

We're working on the scraped sites. Also, advertising revenue has nothing to do with it. We don't even talk about revenue in our search quality meetings, just the utility and speed of our search results page.

Personally I would be a fan of giving users more "knobs" to turn in their search results. For example, we have the toggle switch to include personal results and personalized ranking, vs. showing un-personalized search results. However, it's a complicated product design problem whenever you want to add complexity to something used by a billion people.

Remember that the thing that made Google so popular and iconic originally was the plain search box.

AV had a plain page, too.

Do you guys dogfood your programming search questions or do you have an internal thing for that? Because honestly when I google technical stuff and get corrected despite using "" (since now '+' is deprecated) it makes me super rage. The only thing that escapes it is the super.crazy.java.conventions that are obvious.

You're obviously not vb6 programmers at Google, it kept changing vb6 to 'visual basic' making trying to fix obscure behaviours in vb6 really hard to do because all it would find are vb .net results after the switch.

I had a couple of very unproductive days before working out how to force it to stop changing my search terms.

You're obviously not vb6 programmers at Google

ouch.

Guilty as charged. :-)

I could see how vb6/"visual basic" would cause some irrelevant results to come up. It's probably good sometimes, but also really bad sometimes. I've recorded it in our list of motivational examples that we use to try to come up with improvements to our algorithm. Thanks, and sorry for your wasted productivity.

The old mode was, you put a + before a required term, and you quoted exact (multi-word) phrases. That worked reasonably well and was easy to understand. A + could apply to a single word or to a single phrase, as could a -.

Verbatim was a regression, given it requires you to use the UI instead of typing inline, and it seems to interact with other search options in hard to predict ways.

Putting an "word" in "quotes" is the inline way of exactly matching an individual word. It's conceptually similar to putting a phrase in "quotation marks," so personally I think it makes sense that we have one operator for literal searches.

> A + could apply to a single word or to a single phrase

I don't think a + could apply to a phrase. That was one problem with the + operator; it was not clear to users how it actually worked. In fact, though there were many searches whose results were helped by their use of + (many of whom made by users who are commenting here on HN), there were many searches whose results were largely made worse by their use of +, whether it was inadvertent or overzealously applied.

That was the AltaVista innovation, and one I'm sure Google is happy to weed out of everybody's minds regardless of the fact that it works and works well.

When Google first appeared on the scene, I remember being disappointed in its lack of tweaks, compared to AltaVista. However, the quality of Google's results quickly won me over.

I think you guys are doing a great job. Thanks!

> there were several times where we got you the right result... and you didn't even notice.

1) If I don't notice, then it's not the right result.

2) If I put a + in front of a search term, there's only one reason for that: I explicitly want results containing that word. If you return something not containing that word, then it's not the right result plus I'm going to be annoyed about it.

1) No, I mean, if you search for [nutrition information gm corn] and click on the "right result" for you, you might not even notice that the "right result" didn't have the exact words "nutrition" "information" "gm" but instead had the words "nutritional" "facts" "genetically modified".

2) Do you mean putting a search term in "quotes"? The + operator was retired a while ago. And putting the term in quotes should do what you want, except maybe for high confidence spelling corrections or extremely long tail cases where there are just about no search result to show.

> "there were several times where we got you the right result even though it didn't have the exact words you asked for"

How do you know that? Just because I click on a result doesn't mean it was the correct one. I usually click on A LOT of results just to check if MAYBE there is something relevant (which is mostly not, especially with Google lately).

Maybe they should have another metric that if you click on a second result after the first result, then the first result should get penalized a little. Repeat steps for 'n' clicked results.

Well, that might not be true as well. Sometimes you just want to to check information from more than one source or the result is correct but you want more on that topic and hope to find it in the next results etc. For example, you search for a technical term and (naturally) the first result is a definition in Wiki, but you already know the basics and want a deeper knowledge so you just skip to next results instead. It would not be fair to penalise Wiki for that.

What I meant is, not the first result on the list, but the first result that you click, and then press back and then click on the second result.

Most people I know just open every result in new tabs and continue recursing forward, pruning irrelevant or slow-loading tabs in the process.

I guess you're right that we don't notice. I just searched for "Jim Otteson", only to be given results for "James Otteson". Same person, big help.

At other times, verbatim yields the best results. I guess I just wish there was a link next to the search results that let you repeat the search verbatim, so that we wouldn't have to go all the way to Advanced Search.

What it might come down to is whether making one query worse to make others better is actually a good thing. If they were all acceptable to begin with, it might not be.

Are you permitted to share the types of metrics that Google uses to determine whether an algorithm change is producing better results? Is bounce rate the primary metric that is used?

They look at metrics such as whether an user immediately returns to the search results after going to a page, how long they stay at a page (relatively to other results, etc). That's the primary metric, according to a search engineer who told me during an interview.

Yes, we deal with those sorts of trade-offs every day.

I can't discuss our internal metrics, sorry.

No. Your metrics are deceiving you, because your test suite under-weights or fails to include sophisticated searchers and programmers, and fails to include highly-specific queries with only a few results. For technical people, Google search has gotten so much worse it's hard to ignore.

Google fails for more than half of programming-related queries, because it splits up multi-word identifiers, and spelling-corrects valid technical terms to unrelated English words. It fails when searching for uncommon error messages in quotes.

This might be tolerable if turning on Verbatim mode was easy, but to do it (without a browser plugin) you have to first do a failed search, then click three times, the second of which is hard to aim because the target is animated by the first click.

Google Search fails whenever I'm doing a search where I suspect there are few or no results and want to confirm that. Then there are the queries with one or two matches on StackOverflow or a mailing list that fails to answer the question. You can't just move on, because there are pages and pages of scraper sites cluttering up the results with the exact same message. Improving the ranking doesn't help, because the problem isn't the rankings, it's that you don't know when you're done.

Then there's personalization, and in particular the inter-query persistence. You do this because some people make two queries, and include keywords that accurately indicate what they want in the first query, then omit them from the second query. In my own usage, however, if I do a second query it's often because the first query had something in it that I didn't want, which spoiled the results. Since I always include the keywords that were actually helpful, I get none of the upside. And if my second search then gives bad results, personalization means I can't trust that the reason is part of the query I made.

Basically, you've improved your metrics at the expense of everything on those metrics' blind spots. There are a lot of people whining, most of them unable to articulate what's wrong, but they are right. Now please, go enter these complaints into your bug tracker and fix it.

This is great feedback. Thanks.

Tip for you guys: Stop pushing "We couldn't find results. Here are results similar to these" whenever I type in a very long-tail semi-obscure query. it makes you guys look bad. Just display all the results you find, even the ones that aren't super relevant.

Tip for you: Google thinks that for every one of you, there are 10x as many folks who do exactly the opposite - and want those results.

For most of them there is no "try again", they simply give up and blame Google (and maybe try the query in Bing/Yahoo).

I switched to DuckDuckGo for search for one of the reasons you listed - Google felt the need to guess what I was thinking and it felt like, most of the time, it was getting it wrong (especially with synonym search). One of DuckDuckGo's stated policies is not to modify what you search[0]. The fact that DDG doesn't collect information about me is just a plus.

[0] http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215637-autoco...

I tried to do the same after upgrading my Linux Mint but I couldn't resist more than a couple of days, maybe I'm too used to Google UI..

but I agree with some of the comments, sometimes I know I should search something on Amazon, Wikipedia, iMDB, Tripadvisor etc.. and I just use Google to go there (because typically if you search a movie iMDB is one of the first results, if you search "hotel xyz review" you got Tripadvisor etc..)

It's almost as if we're going back to directories.

I remember when the web was still about the long tail -- it made Google extremely useful.

Today I usually know where the information is before I Google it (StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Amazon, etc.) which means their value add has diminished. It's less "search" and more "navigational aid."

The web still is about long tail, just that the signal:noise ratio has dropped precipitously.

A conspiracy theorist looking at Google's ad clicks numbers might say that better results equal less clicks on ads. Mind you, that on commercial searches essentially all you see is ads. This works up to a point, a tipping point that is. I think Google is unusable now for commercial searches, all you see is ads and eBay, Amazon and other megacorps.

Up to a few years ago, I would have never believed that Google crafted results to increase ad clicks but now I do. Looks like MBAs from fancy colleges have taken over everything. Their ad clicks are increasing by a suspiciously large percentage each quarter.

They are back at page one: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results." http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Sometime ago I had an idea of making a non-commercial search engine that would only search the non-commercial web. All pages that accept payments or show ads would be out.

That would be fantastically interesting to see/use. My only concern is, well, how would you fund it?

Yeah, that's a hard question. But maybe we can mitigate the need for funding by being open source, P2P, or getting donations.

Heh, I find myself in the same situation. Recently I use Google mainly as a shortcut to Wiki, Ebay, Amazon, SO etc. For a "real" search I prefer DuckDuckGo (that doesn't modify search results based on my browsing, search history and big names) and symbolhound.com (that is very useful for programming related searches as it includes symbols).

I also pretty much use Google's search as a proxy for Wikipedia search or StackOverflow search at this point.

But I highly doubt much Yahoo's traffic is coming from search. They've got Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, omg! (which is huge), Flickr, Tumblr, etc. Yahoo is in the content business.

Plus, I know of some people (especially older people) who have Yahoo set as their homepage, and they'll freak out if it gets set to anything else. And besides, Yahoo is a much better homepage than iGoogle for most people, particularly if they use Yahoo mail.

Oh shit, you bring up a good point. Nobody else seemed to mention it, but I bet Tumblr is helping push them over the edge in terms of traffic.

Same here, Google has become `readline in a browser` somehow.

About * Mail, after everything Google did to be more social and whatnot, there's still no integration with Gmail, only Google Plus. A mail counter in Google's black bar would have been more useful.

Actually, Tumblr isn't included in the comScore report - its listed separately at #28.

Given that there is an entire industry centered around gaming search (primarily Google) is anyone surprised search has suffered?

You should always look on page 386,549 of the 8 million search results. That's where the best results can be found.

> ...another factor in the declining performance of your searches for me.

What's amazing here is the obviousness of the fact that Google is only going to do what either a) maintains or b) increases its profits...

Giving you good and relevant search results was the bootstrap. Now (that they've dominated the market and passed the bellcurve) it's nothing more than a hindrance to CTR (click through rates) on paid search ads.

That is, the better (more relevant) the results, the less someone is going to look at the ads.

I don't doubt that Yahoo has a shit load of traffic still, but unless Alexa/Quantcast/ComScore/Compete/Nielsen or any of these other so-called 'web traffic measurement services' have direct access to Yahoo and Google's traffic data (they don't), I'd take these all with a grain of salt. These services have never been accurate.

http://moz.com/blog/testing-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-comp...

From - comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2009/5/comScore_Announced_Media_Metrix_360

"The new approach combines person-level measurement from comScore's proprietary 2 million person global panel with Web site server metrics in order to account for 100 percent of a Web site's audience."

It's possible that Yahoo and Google are providing server metrics via javascript tagging to comScore. That would give them direct access to the traffic data. I believe that Quantcast and maybe Nielsen both offer something similar as well.

"It's possible that Yahoo and Google are providing server metrics via javascript tagging to comScore."

Your suggestion is essentially that Yahoo and Google are providing non-public data from which revenue growth/etc can almost be calculated, to outside companies?

The incentive is ad dollars. Ad companies want third party verification.

Google runs all their own advertising. They have no need for third party verification.

That explains why debaserab2 was able to find b.scorecardresearch for Yahoo, but not Google.

One of those things is not like the other.

Go to yahoo.com, open devtools/firebug, scour the network tab for "b.scorecardresearch.com", that's comscore. These numbers are as accurate as can be.

The numbers for Yahoo may be accurate. What about Google and all the others on the list? When I go to Google, I see no "b.scorecardresearch" anywhere to be found on my network tab.

Common attitude to Comscore numbers in the Web industry is yes, their data is off, but they're under-/over-counting everyone more or less equally, so relative positions and growth numbers are generally correct.

With that said, mobile used to be Comscore's Achilles heel, not sure if they're started buying click data from mobile ISPs to rectify that. Gmail is leading US email client, and Gmail Mobile combined with Google Maps might make Google the largest mobile property.

And Quantcast* disagrees pretty strongly: https://www.quantcast.com/google.com vs https://www.quantcast.com/yahoo.com. This is only traffic to yahoo.com and google.com, though, leaving out youtube, flickr, and various other domains, but it's likely that's what comscore is measuring on the google side. Given that Youtube's reach is nearly as high as Google.com's, that's probably not helping Yahoo.

* Disclaimer, I work there

Your links are looking at just google.com vs yahoo.com. The cnet article is referring to web properties owned by google vs properties owned by yahoo.

If anything I think we should read this as "Users with a browser toolbar installed are more likely to use yahoo"

I just finished a 10 week internship at Yahoo and while I can't say much about where the company is headed strategically, I can say that it's a super exciting time to be working there :)

You mean you aren't allowed to say, or you aren't really sure?

He/she was an intern. Typically, interns are neither privy to strategy, nor are they sure of where things are headed.

I work at Yahoo!. Our interns attend weekly meetings where strategy is discussed. :)

Tactics you mean. Tactics change frequently, to align projections with actual results and market changes.

Strategy doesn't change as often, and has a longer lifespan. If your strategy needs reviewing weekly you probably don't want to disclose it.

I've been experimenting with DuckDuckGo and I must say, I'm finding what I'm looking for pretty quickly (minus junk results) in the first few results. Their WolframAlpha results are actually pretty good too. I hope they can move into image searching that isn't dependent on Google or Bing though.

I'm still curious as to what criteria they used to differentiate Yahoo traffic under "Yahoo! Sites" though. Did they also include Flickr and other acquisitions as well? (Tumblr seems to be on its own still)

DDGs bang notation is amazing. Now when I use other people's browsers It feels clunky.

I used DDG for a while and really wanted it to work for me, but for any non-obvious search, it simply falls on its face. It's easy to take for granted how good Google is at determining equivalent keywords based on context, or at grokking context in general.

I only adopted DDG over privacy concerns, and StartPage is filling this need wonderfully. Hopefully it stays up.

Ah yes, if I'm searching for something non-obvious, it does get a bit tedious. It's not like Google where I still find it after the 3 or 4th page; the results just get further and further from what I expect.

DDG's biggest problem so far is "grokking context" as you put it.

The contrast was/is starker: DDG would return pages of irrelevant crap, and Google/StartPage would have exactly what I wanted in the first 1-3 results, with usually 8 of the top ten being relevant. Google is simply leagues ahead of the competition right now in both index quality and query recognition.

I hear this a lot, but no one ever gives me a search example that bears it out. I !g sometimes after I'm just not seeing what I want on DDG, and as often as not, the Google results are even worse.

Sure. Just now, I wanted to make sure I was right about elements that fire the DOM "change" event for a guy in ##javascript by looking at Mozilla documentation. Unfortunately, I had DDG active in my search bar in Firefox. "mdn change" in DDG turns up nothing remotely useful, whereas the first result in StartPage (Google) is what I want, and the subsequent results are all of some interest. Google seems to understand the proximity of the name of a common DOM reference and the name of a DOM event (probably via some graph) and Bing/DDG is clueless.

I tried DuckDuckGo and was instantly turned off their website due to the terrible results they display. Not to mention that site looks like it was made by a programmer, not a designer i.e. unreadable.

It's a bit of an acquired taste in the UI department, but I got used to it in about a couple of days. As for results, it may be that I'm searching for common/obvious things, but most of what I'm looking for are in at least the first 1-4 result or so.

It's not just their image searching that is dependent on Google and Bing. The site is basically just a skin on top of Bing's index. They do have their own spider but I highly doubt you see many results crawled by it.

It's a bit unfair to call it a skin on top of Bing etc... DDG isn't another HotBot.

There's quite a bit more happening in the background : https://dukgo.com

ComScore's data is absurdly inaccurate and subject to considerable bias (usually composed of less savvy internet users that have shady software installed).

Anyhow. Kudos to Yahoo!

Correct me if I'm making an unwarranted leap here, but why shouldn't I read this as "More Yahoo users have spyware than Google users"?

I believe it. I love the Yahoo homepage. And when I'm with a group and someone mentioned something obscure... just about everyone mutters - "oh yeah, I saw that on Yahoo."

Keep in mind, these are not a geeky bunch, I'm the only redditor among them. We're talking about people who use their phones for everything and the computer to browse the web or answer an email.

Where do you live?

I just went to Yahoo.com. I believe this is my first time. The frontpage articles are "Jennifer Aniston's vacation bikini", "Bizarre Russian beach scene", "Horned sea monster is a mystery", "Forgot something, Lindsay?", and "Tycoons giving wealth away."

And that's the last time I go to yahoo.com

Sounds like linkbaity links the average guy would like to click on :) (heck, I might check out Jennifer's vacation bikini myself :) ).

My GF uses Yahoo, they redesigned the webmail recently and she was quite confused (couldn't attach a file, we found that drag n' drop worked, but I didn't find the attachment option).

I don't use Yahoo, but I do like that the site is useful for casual information junkies. There's a very pleasant inundation of news in various media that you don't get from sources like google news or newspaper sites.

I go to Yahoo maybe once a day. I can't read intellectual stuff that makes me think every single time. When I need to read casual stuff, I head to Yahoo and they always satisfy that need.

Yahoo tops Google in number of unique visitors, not (necessarily) in US traffic. The cnet article misquotes the ComScore report.

I think one of the reasons is that Yahoo announced that program to recirculate mail ids, and people have been visiting their long forgotten mailboxes to make sure they don't get closed.

Yahoo has always had an (insane) policy of fairly eagerly deleting all mail from dormant mailboxes after 6 months, so it's not surprising people don't trust them...

That was my conclusion as well. I visited yahoo for the first time in years to reaffirm my account name (and hopefully grab some other ones).

This supposedly doesn't count yahoo's recent acquisition - Tumblr - either. http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/08/21/yahoo-tops-...

Fantasy Football begins. Seriously, that's all I use yahoo for but I use it a hell of a lot during football season.

That was my exact thought when I read this headline. My Yahoo usage from January-->Mid July is no existent. Mid-July--> December is 4-5 times per day.

Ha! Same here. I completely forget about Yahoo! until I get that invite every year.

Could this possibly be the reason? http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/52805929240/yourname-yahoo-com-...

I went to yahoo for the first time in 3 years because of this opportunity.

Which Yahoo! properties could potentially be bringing this amount of traffic?

Flickr

tumblr

The article says that Tumblr is still considered a separate entity and it comes at #38

Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Mail, Flickr, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo News. It still doesn't smell right, though.

Fantasy Football.

Correct me if I'm wrong but these numbers don't include smartphone or tablet numbers, correct? comScore's Multi-Platform numbers for July haven't been released yet (that I'm aware of). http://www.comscore.com/Products/Audience_Analytics/Media_Me...

What constitutes "internet property"? Is this exclusively search or does this include other products such as Tumblr?

articles like this drive me nuts because now I've got a manager kicking ideas around like must focus on yahoo/get web properties moving in yahoo....(which shouldn't be a concern, indexed sites are indexed)...but it's so murky trying to explain or even see yourself the clear situation

The reason is porn on Tumblr. People going through pages and pages of porn on Tumblr...

This "news" is meaningless. Quality, not quantity is the name of the game.

Because of their malware "search" toolbar still on your grandmas computer?

Congrats yahoo.

Try searching this on Yahoo or ddgo and then on Google:

ruby sinatra cors

Google still gives me the best results.

I don't think the score is credible.

Traffic is a vanity metric.

This is a hoax, I am certain Yahoo is gaming the ComScore metrics in their instrumentation.

Actual comScore data: http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2013/8/comSc...

Probably because Yahoo is not optimized :P

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