Yahoo & Google : Man vs. Machine
Here’s an interesting article from Sunday’s NY Times about Yahoo! and its long term search strategy.
I was at Yahoo! on Friday talking to Local GM Paul Levine about his just-added keynote at ILM:05. He and I discussed a range of things, among them social search and community.
One thing that is in the article and in consistent with my observation of the comparative strategies of Google and Yahoo! is that Yahoo! (as I’ve said before) has made a really big bet on “social search”—using people and community to create a differentiated experience. Think MyWeb, 360, Local, etc.
Google is certainly mindful of the importance of community and user-generated content (e.g., APIs, Blog Search, Orkut, etc.). But the company appears to be focused on developing tools and applications to aggregate that content from third-party sources rather than create an evironment in which its users create the content themselves.
There’s a lot more to say about this, but one point of divergence between the two companies appears to be around this “social” or “community” issue.
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Greg Sterling, Local Search and Convergence Columnist – Greg Sterling is managing editor of The Kelsey Group who also writes the Local Media Journal Blog.
