10 ms·
Yahoo is making a return to search
- altdataseller 4y agoI wish Yahoo would bring back Yahoo Games. I miss the days when I would waste time playing Spades, Hearts and Yahoo pool
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoYahoo games was the best when I was a kid. Lot of fun games and chats with weirdos
- sogen 4y agoYahoo pipes
- Hisoka 4y ago[dead]
- cableshaft 4y agoYou 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.
- smusamashah 4y agoWith 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.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoYou can never go home.
- b112 4y agoAnd even if you find a way in, the new owners start screaming and yelling.
- krolden 4y ago<3 yahoo pool. Wasted a lot of time on that in high school.
- gremlinsinc 4y agoI 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.
- pcdoodle 4y agoIt 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.
- tagami 4y agoIf they do, they should rename it Akebono
- kube-system 4y agoThey 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.
- fumar 4y agoI 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- version_five 4y agoI 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.
- kube-system 4y agoCrawlers 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.
- pram 4y agoI 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.
- Macha 4y agoAOL 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.
- joegahona 4y agoBolt on a tab called “community” that links to the corpse of MySpace and call it a day.
- krolden 4y agoAnd for some reason they still run att.net email, and its a complete clusterfuck.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- getoj 4y ago>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?
- kube-system 4y ago238 job postings at Yahoo use the word "people" 3 use the word "folks"
- Y_Y 4y agoIt's discriminatory against unpersons
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoAnd me. I self-identify as a crustacean.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoEver since the finding of uncleftish beholding.
- LastTrain 4y agoFolks is a synonym for people. You’re welcome.
- poszlem 4y ago[flagged]
- karaokeyoga 4y agoIt can also be a way of saying "people" with a more casual tone. I've used it for years ("Hi folks" sounds better than "Hi people" to me).
- 4y ago
- freitzkriesler 4y agoAll 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.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y agohow 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?
- freitzkriesler 4y agoGood 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.
- Double_a_92 4y agoYeah, 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 :/)
- nicbou 4y agouBlacklist helps remove some of those links, particularly Pinterest and StackOverflow clones.
- freitzkriesler 4y agoHeros sometimes don't wear caps. Thanks mate.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- boardwaalk 4y agoI 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.
- saddd 4y agoI have the feeling that whatever you're talking about is explicitly not crawlable.
- celdon25 4y agoThat doesn’t change anything regarding the actual point of the comment.
- astrange 4y agoYour idea for a search competitor is to ignore robots.txt?
- VWWHFSfQ 4y agoor an advertising competitor that ignores DNT! oh wait
- berkle4455 4y agoIt's a just a text file.
- chihuahua 4y agoThis 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!"
- celdon25 4y agoYes, clearly that's the best possible interpretation of what I said. /s
- grapesurgeon 4y ago[dead]
- m3kw9 4y agoIs search being commoditized by CharGPT?
- Dr_Birdbrain 4y agoI 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.
- aeyes 4y agoUnless 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.
- pcurve 4y agoI think they are such underdog that I don’t think it will have problem attracting strong talent working on competitive search product
- b112 4y agoHuh. 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.
- MR4D 4y agoIf 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.
- pcurve 4y agoWhat’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.
- VWWHFSfQ 4y ago99.9% of all email in existence is spam so "Their spam filter is not great though" sounds like a pretty big deal to me
- flavius29663 4y agothey still filter most spam, not as well as google though
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoIt’s good once it’s trained, something you don’t need to do with Gmail
- sys_64738 4y agosearch.yahoo.com never went away.
- kevinmrose 4y agoThey're using Bing to power their results, and have been since 2009. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
- jameshush 4y ago(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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- axg11 4y agoA 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.
- nl 4y agoThis isn't true. Search engines rely on fair use: https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33810.html https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33810.html
- schemescape 4y agoAgreed. Sites like GitHub actively monitor for unwanted crawling/scraping and throttle requests.
- paxys 4y agoGoogle 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.
- geocar 4y ago> 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.
- ding_dang 4y ago[flagged]
- froglets 4y agoI 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.
- rgrieselhuber 4y agoPunchfork (https://www.punchfork.com/ https://www.punchfork.com/) is a good micro search engine for recipes.
- unixhero 4y agoNew York Tines has a great recipes site! https://cooking.nytimes.com/search?q=Pie https://cooking.nytimes.com/search?q=Pie
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- paxys 4y agoYahoo 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.
- indigodaddy 4y agoWikipedia 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?
- b112 4y agoI find yahoo finance blasts the pants off of google's variant.
- 255kb 4y agoWhen 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.
- zetazzed 4y agoI 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.
- gremlinsinc 4y agothat'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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- counterpartyrsk 4y agoBring back AltaVista
- self_awareness 4y agoThey've downloaded the Yandex leak and they finally figured out how to do search? (sorry for that joke :P)
- jiveturkey 4y agoI understand Yahoo pays quite well, so that should help.