5 ms·

I have never enjoyed Yahoo. Even during their heyday I was an Altavista user, the search seemed to give much better results. Yahoo's website design always seeme

by Kequc 11y ago

I have never enjoyed Yahoo. Even during their heyday I was an Altavista user, the search seemed to give much better results. Yahoo's website design always seemed to be extremely cluttered and hasn't really updated much since then. Whenever I use their webmail half the time the page doesn't load. I get the sense that there are 100 unnecessary services running at any time. Their chat is dwarfed by a dozen competing products. Their news offering is unnecessary. They don't offer new products. The entire site needs to be re-written. When you do that, why not just open an auxiliary company and redirect all of your users there? What is the purpose of the Daily Mail buying them, what will that do? And why would anyone mind or care? The worst that will happen is nothing right.

TuringXYZ 11y ago
I would mind and care. The Daily Mail is a sleeze journal. My guess is half the value would be unfettered access to email accounts. They would dig through all sorts of emails to find juicy news stories and photos. This is not a reputable or ethical journal -- they make up stories, publish disghusting articles and know no bounds.
- DanBC 11y ago
  To support this point: http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/feb/14/dailymail-hacked-off-campaign http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/feb/14/dail... The Daily Mail are scum and it's disappointing that they're not in the HN banned sites list.
  - gadders 11y ago
    I don't think Hacked Off are a great decider of who is scum or not. The campaign is a Guardian proxy to protect rich and powerful celebrities and politicians from press investigations.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      But that link isn't Hacked Off's subjective opinion - it's an objective list of breaches of the Editor's code of practice published by the Press Complaints Commission.
- Kequc 11y ago
  Why wouldn't daily mail just offer their own email service @dailymail.com? Surely that would be less expensive. I doubt there would be too much juicy news flowing through yahoo's email server. Then again as you say, Daily Mail is pretty much a tabloid. I think grabbing specifics from personal email might be a little extreme. They might, on the other hand, monitor trends to see what people are talking about in general. That I might believe.
  - TrickedOut 11y ago
    Because yahoo mail offers a 20year treasure trove of email whereas a new email service would offer no such history. I, like many, started my first email account on Yahoo. It still lives, even though most current usage has migrated to gmail. Also, only a fool would use @dailymail as their primary account knowing the history of the paper's privacy violations.
  - yrro 11y ago
    > I think grabbing specifics from personal email might be a little extreme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacking_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki... The Daily Mail are a separate organization but I would not trust them to get up to exactly the same tricks.
danielki 11y ago
They're buying pageviews/traffic for their content. According to Alexa[0], Yahoo is still the 5th-largest site globally and in the US. That's a pretty large amount of traffic. Assuming Wikipedia (at #7) gets ~765M monthly views [1], and Yahoo gets more than that, that's close to a billion monthly page views. Even if they do nothing other than switch out the Yahoo "relevant stories" algorithm to one that features more of their own, they can still extract a decent amount of value from that. To your other point - as a consumer, I've personally never really enjoyed any Yahoo offering other than Flickr and fantasy sports. However, as a developer, I saw them do a whole lot of great stuff that they never followed through on. YUI [2] was the first UI framework I used, and was great for rapidly prototyping/developing a good-looking UI half a decade before Bootstrap was a thing. Yahoo Pipes [3] was a rather interesting experiment that sadly never really took off. YQL [4] evolved out of that, and is a pretty neat way to API-ify page scraping. I've used it in a couple small projects. [0] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yahoo.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yahoo.com [1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined... [2] http://yuilibrary.com/ http://yuilibrary.com/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes [4] https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/ https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/

by Kequc 11y ago

TuringXYZ 11y ago

I would mind and care. The Daily Mail is a sleeze journal. My guess is half the value would be unfettered access to email accounts. They would dig through all sorts of emails to find juicy news stories and photos. This is not a reputable or ethical journal -- they make up stories, publish disghusting articles and know no bounds.

DanBC 11y ago
To support this point: http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/feb/14/dailymail-hacked-off-campaign http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/feb/14/dail... The Daily Mail are scum and it's disappointing that they're not in the HN banned sites list.
- gadders 11y ago
  I don't think Hacked Off are a great decider of who is scum or not. The campaign is a Guardian proxy to protect rich and powerful celebrities and politicians from press investigations.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    But that link isn't Hacked Off's subjective opinion - it's an objective list of breaches of the Editor's code of practice published by the Press Complaints Commission.
Kequc 11y ago
Why wouldn't daily mail just offer their own email service @dailymail.com? Surely that would be less expensive. I doubt there would be too much juicy news flowing through yahoo's email server. Then again as you say, Daily Mail is pretty much a tabloid. I think grabbing specifics from personal email might be a little extreme. They might, on the other hand, monitor trends to see what people are talking about in general. That I might believe.
- TrickedOut 11y ago
  Because yahoo mail offers a 20year treasure trove of email whereas a new email service would offer no such history. I, like many, started my first email account on Yahoo. It still lives, even though most current usage has migrated to gmail. Also, only a fool would use @dailymail as their primary account knowing the history of the paper's privacy violations.
- yrro 11y ago
  > I think grabbing specifics from personal email might be a little extreme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacking_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki... The Daily Mail are a separate organization but I would not trust them to get up to exactly the same tricks.

danielki 11y ago

They're buying pageviews/traffic for their content. According to Alexa[0], Yahoo is still the 5th-largest site globally and in the US. That's a pretty large amount of traffic. Assuming Wikipedia (at #7) gets ~765M monthly views [1], and Yahoo gets more than that, that's close to a billion monthly page views. Even if they do nothing other than switch out the Yahoo "relevant stories" algorithm to one that features more of their own, they can still extract a decent amount of value from that. To your other point - as a consumer, I've personally never really enjoyed any Yahoo offering other than Flickr and fantasy sports. However, as a developer, I saw them do a whole lot of great stuff that they never followed through on. YUI [2] was the first UI framework I used, and was great for rapidly prototyping/developing a good-looking UI half a decade before Bootstrap was a thing. Yahoo Pipes [3] was a rather interesting experiment that sadly never really took off. YQL [4] evolved out of that, and is a pretty neat way to API-ify page scraping. I've used it in a couple small projects. [0] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yahoo.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yahoo.com [1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined... [2] http://yuilibrary.com/ http://yuilibrary.com/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes [4] https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/ https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/