Yahoo Guns for CNET Reviews
Michael Arrington
45 comments »
Yahoo Tech launched tonight, taking clear aim at the massively popular CNET Reviews property.
The best way to get a quick understanding of the site is to take the tour, also linked from the home page. Yahoo Tech is providing content about technology products from Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Answers, in house experts, and third party sources like Consumer Reports.
Product reviews can be accessed via a tag cloud or the search bar. Yahoo Tech includes product reviews, how to guides and other content. Yahoo Tech also has four resident bloggers to give product advice to different customer segments.
They are making a big effort to dumb things down for non-techies and differentiate themselves from CNET and other review sites. Is it better than CNET? No, not even close, yet. The depth and quality of reviews just isn’t there. Is the site slow as hell? Yes, probably from the massive traffic hitting it and the fairly heavy use of Flash. We’ll keep an eye on this as it evolves.
Wow, that is a very Web 2.0 design.
Wow… I am impressed. Yahoo Tech is a perfect example of ‘web2.0′ design. Its got every thing, ubiquitous search, tag clouds, videos. But most importantly is that these web2.0 elements are made accessible everyday users. Notice how the tag cloud has a ‘whats this’ button. No thats what they hey have done right!
That’s a big hit. At least the ideea. If the information provided are as good as the ideea Cnet and other smaller review sites are in deep trouble, especially if Yahoo has a good SEO team behind (and hmmm…they should)
All I see are a BUNCH of HUGE HUGE ads all over the page. Cnet has plenty of ads, but Yahoo’s colors are so “web 2.0″ that everything blends in, and you can’t tell what is what when doing a cursory scan. Ridiculous.
hehehehe that’s the big catch…from the marketing point of view that evil genius…for the rest of us it sucks
I know Yahoo are a media company, but having more ads on a page than content seems a little shortsighted. Boo!
LOL! They’ve certainly nailed down the filtering process for user reviews. This is the one shown right now for a Toshiba laptop:
“Hello Seller,good day to you, am Mr Moses Frank from U.S, and it is my joy/happenees to let you know that am highly intrested in your laptops/notebooks,and i will like to buy 5 peices of this items for my clients, and i will pay you with (Cash in your hand before you ship)so email me back to my direct email:(mosesfrank1@yahoo.co.uk).”
I haven’t seen this mentioned, but what made the biggest impression on me after skmming the site briefly is that they are targeting women. They are not just making the site friendly for women, they are not just considering women as part of their whole audience, they are aggressively looking for opportunities to make the site all about women. This is consistent with what I hear about gadget demographics: women buy them massively, way more than any geeky fanboy would ever expect. As far as I can tell CNET isn’t making this kind of effort.
I generally like Yahoo and their services, but if these reviews are populated by the same idiots/kiddies who ask dumb questions and provide useless answers at the “Ask Yahoo” service, I’ll be sticking with Cnet.
q. “What’s the best dog?”
a. “OMG r Shnauzzer is the Beste dog in the World…”
I can’t wait to see product reviews:
“This laptop sux even though I don’t have one ‘cuz it’s ugly and stupid and runs Windoze!”
It is about time comparison shopping sites begin developing their products beyond arbitrage systems. Product development will lead to more content, more content will produce added value and this will all result in a stronger brand.
I am sorry to say despite the millions of dollars comparison shopping sites are making, outside of the tech savvy crowd, they are not shopping destinations, they are facilitators.
Yahoo has just taken a step in the right direction.
I may be just a rich, dumb, single girl in software development but even I know that Yahoo! is doing the smart thing here (at least from a business standpoint).
–Michelle
The heavy use of flash is really annoying me. I left the site quickly because I couldn’t use my browser properly.
I don’t know if it’s something Yahoo! will improve shortly, but I’ll check the site again later. From what I’ve seen, it looks nerdy enough for me to like it!
to be fair, you cant see CNETs videos without flash either. i think the Yahoo site has a real chance, unlike CNET’s ghastly offering. for the time being and the foreseeable future, nothing will beat Newegg’s reviews though..
Finally a product from yahoo I can appreciated.
I like it.
The UI is well organized and the tag clouds and width control ideas are creative Web 2.0 additions. The density of ads is abit too much, yet tidy and not unexpected from a product-centerd site.
But there is always more to be done. It’s good to see that Yahoo is learning to integrate their products (Tech, Shopping and Answers)like Google does, very efficiently I might add. But what if they started integrating news related to the product from Yahoo News, relevant podcasts from Yahoo Podcasts, and ability to migrate My Tech to my Yahoo 360. It would give the user a much better experience.
Overall, it is a very good product which I already started to use.
This is a work of art - very attractive(almost beautiful) - very navigationally friendly - very easy to read - very mainstream tech content.
Obviously, alot of thought, planning, and learning from others went into this debut
Although it’s missing the web 2.0 functionality of Yahoo tech, the best tech review site out there is *not* cnet.com - it’s http://www.cnet.co.uk, especially the gadget blog at http://crave.cnet.co.uk. Clean design, easy navigation, not creaking under the weight of content led by bad navigation (like its .com big brother).
Search Engines WEB - Are you joking? This first attempt is totally ridiculous. sacrificing simple usablity for too much Web 2.0 tinklets. Tag clouds are useful when you are wondering what others are looking for, not when you already have a idea of what you want.
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