Yahoo wants to change your mind about its search engine. It wants you to know that it is better at helping you find things thanks to features like its SearchAssist auto-complete keywords (which has been around for a year), safe searching filters, and Search Monkey add-ons. So it is launching a campaign with display ads like the one on the left for the Web and radio spots as well trying to paint Google’s search engine as an inferior product—a place where people go to get lost.
Of course, Yahoo’s market share numbers tell a different story. In the U.S., it’s share of query volume as measured by comScore declined about a point in August to 19.6 percent, while Google’s rose a point to 63 percent. And if you look at traffic to each search engine, In the U.S., Yahoo has been flat for a year (up 0.8 percent) with 76.1 million unique visitors in August, while Google is up 16.9 percent to 127.9 million uniques. (These numbers are just for their respective search engines). Worldwide, the gap is even bigger, with Google attracting a whopping 636 million unique visitors in August (up 31.7 percent), versus Yahoo’s 231 million (down 3.4 percent).
So can an advertising campaign change any of that? Search is not like a soft drink. People use the search engine that they think can do the best job in helping them find things. Now, maybe Google has brainwashed all of us to believe that it does indeed produce more relevant results. And in a blind taste-test, more people might choose Yahoo’s results. But if that is the case, I’d rather take an interactive quiz that puts each search engine to the test and make my own decision. That would go much farther to convince me to switch than Yahoo’s current creative.
I don’t know what Yahoo! is trying to do. It’s about time they give up their search engine and give in to Google.
Why? Yahoo has the superior engine in a lot of ways. Search Yahoo! for “Braylon Edwards” or for any movie that is out. Their glue page is even better.
People get so hung up on the Google brand, assuming that everything with the Google label is the best. It’s not.
I agree with the Hater. Yahoo isn’t as dead as people like to say it is. It has good core services and just needs leadership at the top. Someone who can sell a vision, make people excited again about the company.
Yahoo needs to do more to clean up the spam on the search engine (especially spurious porn).
Unless they are able to do a good job at that, many people will not use it and instead choose Google or Live.com–which is not half bad (but its still lacking when compared to Google).
I agree, enough with the search spamming results on users. Example 98 million results for search term “dentist”. One result with a Dental Locator zip search box and social networked results is all a consumer needs.
AdvertisingLocator.com
yes but ur dental locator zip box doesnt exist. u spend so much time commenting and no time actually building ur sites.
Why don’t u actually put some real content on ur site instead of random videos and clip art.
This strategy is identical to Ask’s, which failed.
Is it the man in poster is Jerry? Lost and no one ever want to find him…
yahoo needs to run some tv ad’s similar to mac vs pc
Yahoo should just sell itself now, and just get it over with…so we can all drink champagne and eat cake
That ad picture was funny. I just changed my default firefox search engine to yahoo.com. I’ll give it a try.
Anyone else notice YouTube had more searches than Yahoo in August according to Comscore?
seems like a last-minute resort (neutrally seen.. I don’t hate Yahoo, unlike TC), it happens often enough that small companies make adverts for themselves by bashing on the bigger ones, where the firms with real prestige just ignore the smaller ones.. plus there’s still the fact that many web users still remember the days when Yahoo had three little words standing under their searchbar… “powered by google”, don’t know about anyone else, but back then it gave me the impression that Yahoo didn’t have a search engine of their own at all.
Well building your sites SEO around what Google likes often leaves you out of the top 10 for every other engine. Google can’t just be as easily gamed. That being said I’d rather have top 3 position in Google for a search term VS top three in every other engine. Plus MSN search figures are inflated.
I prefer Yahoo Search over Google. I did go back and forth but moved to Yahoo a few months back. Don’t miss Google at all.
have been using yahoo search since 3-4 years (just to be different from my friends
)
with all the customized shortcuts im loving out. occassionally i do goto google if i dont find in yahoo, bt most of those cases, it doesnt show up in google also.
Could any search engine find new searchers through an ad campaign?
My impression is that even though most ppl use Google, most of them do not have a strong preference, they just happened to use Google because everyone says “google this” or because it is default in their browser. Only geeks like us care about page ranking algorithms, semantic graphs, amount of crawled data, all that technical stuff. Most consumers don’t. Try skinning Yahoo! search to look like Google, hide the URL field, and I bet, 99.9% of the Google users won’t be able to tell the difference (even some of us who read this blog).
You said it.
More than one blind test proves that (where people picked Yahoo!’s search results as the superior set) till the “brand” names were disclosed and people chose Google as the superior one then.
Classic Coke vs Pepsi test.
I personally use Yahoo! (and occassionaly use Google). The reality is, for whatever reason people are using Google. Will be interesting to see if people switch over.
YaHoO is Google’s bitch!
Comscore’s September numbers are out… even though G is still dominant, they lost share to Yahoo this month. The data above is outdated
what are the new numbers?
I find myself returning to Yahoo more and more for searches these days. Google isn’t as good as it used to be.
Yahoo has to add new features to differentiate them from others, for example, PopGist has a nice presentation that Yahoo may want.
Eric,
you probably should add something to this post to resolve the conflict between this and your later post “ComScore: Google’s Search Volume Accelerates In September, But Market Share Dips”, where you personally shot your argument that yahoo’s share was in decline … without acknowledging it.
Yahoo search engin is dead. Most of the Yhoo new searchers are from Google.
I think they’re too far behind in the caching race. They used to have a fairly competent search engine, but Google totally dwarfs everything else now. There’s little that one can find using other search engines that he or she can’t using Google, and many of the smaller sites that appear on Google don’t exist anywhere else.
Go Yahooooooooo!
The main thing that pulled me into Google was the variety of products that they offer beyond being just a search engine. Yahoo has a lot of the same things, Google just does it better for me. I dig the Google toolbars more than the Yahoo toolbar, Gmail is better for me, it’s all synched between analytics and adwords too. Yahoo has a lot of work to do for the business user, but maybe they can pull back more casual users?
Jake
NoteScribe: Premier Notes Software
Well…I’d say search engines are a lot like soft drinks. Sure, there are label differences, “taste” (relevance) differences but in the end…a lot can be said for the marketing spin & hype around each one.
Oddly enough, the soft drink market share of the big five is pretty close to the search engine market share of the big five.
My experience with Yahoo is that only large sites are small Deiten have made it difficult
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