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Yahoo Never Was A Search Engine

August 7, 2009

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Well I’ve never been a fan of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and she con­tin­ues to stupify me with her ridicu­lous state­ments which she holds to so dearly.

As cov­ered over at Search Engine Land Bartz was inter­viewed in the New York Times. She is stun­ningly moronic in some of her claims:

“Yahoo, accord­ing to Ms. Bartz, sim­ply feeds search results for peo­ple who have grown curi­ous while read­ing one of its news sto­ries or watch­ing a video. It doesn’t gen­er­ally pop into peo­ples’ minds as the first place to go look for answers dur­ing the course of their day-to-day activities.”

How is that pos­si­bly the case? On so many lev­els I would argue the valid­ity of this claim:

  1. Yahoo was ini­tially a search direc­tory then a search engine then added portals.
  2. If Yahoo doesn’t pop into mind as answer­ing ques­tions for users, then uh, what about Yahoo Answers? What’s the point of that then?
  3. Bartz is sin­gle­hand­edly dis­man­tling Yahoo as a com­pany with unique soft­ware tech­nol­ogy and turn­ing it into a por­tal and con­tent com­pany. Granted for many years they have had a con­tent focus but Yahoo Search Mar­ket­ing and Yahoo Search were always major com­po­nents of their company.

“The biggest thing for Yahoo is increas­ing the num­ber of pages peo­ple con­sume and slap­ping as many dis­play ads as pos­si­ble across those pages. “My for­tunes are tied to my pages,” Ms. Bartz said.”

This is non­sen­scial. I have an ad net­work. We are inter­ested in con­tent pages to serve adver­tis­ing. Yahoo is a soft­ware tech­nol­ogy company…er…it WAS a soft­ware tech­nol­ogy com­pany. How sad for Yahoo to have a such a short sighted myopic CEO.

“Accord­ing to Ms. Bartz, the major­ity of Yahoo’s sites will go the way of Sports. In par­tic­u­lar, Yahoo will throw invest­ments behind its enter­tain­ment, finance and news oper­a­tions. Ms. Bartz noted that there are plenty of unem­ployed jour­nal­ists out there to pick up.”

Well Carol. Hey Carol. Umm Carol.…those jour­nal­ists are unem­ployed because the notion of tra­di­tional jour­nal­ism and sim­ply serv­ing up that con­tent and sell­ing ads is not the same as it used to be. They are unem­ployed because many com­pa­nies in this space are unprofitable.

Excuse me while I go bang my head against a brick wall.

“In addi­tion, Ms. Bartz will remem­ber that Terry Semel, a long­time Warner Broth­ers exec­u­tive, was brought in before to turn Yahoo into more of a media com­pany. Mr. Semel’s tenure was per­haps char­ac­ter­ized more for los­ing to Google than any­thing else.”

Clearly Carol doesn’t believe the notion that if we are not aware of our his­tory we are doomed to repeat the mis­takes of the past. I think we can revise this though at this point, Yahoo isn’t in the “los­ing” posi­tion any longer. It has lost. Full Stop.

“Ms. Bartz has decided to cor­rect past mis­takes by get­ting all of the employ­ees on the same page and pre­sent­ing a more con­sis­tent look across Yahoo’s sites. In addi­tion, she’s try­ing to boost morale and get the energy of the com­pany up again –- a task hurt by the hit Yahoo’s shares took after the Microsoft deal was announced.

“I felt bad for the employ­ees because they think it’s a report card,” Ms. Bartz said.”

Hon­estly, this woman is a CEO? Of any com­pany? Your share price is a report card of sorts, it’s the mar­ket respond­ing to the strate­gic deci­sions being made. Clearly this is per­ceived as being a bad deci­sion. Which it is. It’s a hor­ri­ble decision.

In fact it’s a series of hor­ri­ble deci­sions, capped off by myopic think­ing and topped off with a healthy dose of delusion.

Way to go Carol!

Update — Just ran into a fan­tas­tic quote from the New York Times Bits Blog:

I’ve got to won­der how much run­ning a sales force that ped­dles expen­sive soft­ware to engi­neers and design­ers has to do with run­ning a free Web site that attracts users through brand­ing and prod­ucts and makes money through advertising.

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Written by Dan Nedelko · Filed Under Features, Internet Marketing, Search Marketing, google 

Comments

3 Responses to “Yahoo Never Was A Search Engine”

  1. Side Mareresort on February 6th, 2010 10:37 am

    What an arti­cle, she is sup­posed to be good. Quote: “She does not put up with behav­iors that don’t push the orga­ni­za­tion for­ward. She’s Intol­er­ant of any­one late to a meet­ing.” Or isn’t this good ;-) Being a good pub­lic speaker is essen­tial for a CEO, and she makes the one mis­take after the other. Can Yahoo attract good employ­ees? Last thing I saw was the Euro­pean direc­tor leav­ing the com­pany, and the stocks went up !?

  2. Brad on February 14th, 2010 10:43 pm

    Thanks for the great con­tent and infor­ma­tion. I am always going through the inter­net
    search­ing for good con­tent and to also get ideas for my home based busi­ness web sites
    and future arti­cles on the basic and gen­eral sub­ject. Again, thanks for the great con­tent.
    I will be com­ing back to review this site for more infor­ma­tion in the near future.

    Brad

    http://yourdesiredlifestyle.com

  3. best seo on May 4th, 2010 9:54 pm

    par­tially true, this is why google went up that fast. now bing took over yahoo and the things would change in this regard. but the truth behind Carol Bartz is that yahoo is a lot more diver­si­fied as google, which mainly relies on search engine. yahoo reported a decent profit for last year there­fore we may give her credit :)

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