Yahoo! has been trying hard to outdo Google with the geek crowd. A few years ago it opened up its search API. Having an idea for a search product, I decided to use it to develop MetaMojo.com, the domain specific vertical search engine.
All to say, maybe it’s because I am not in Yahoo!’s backyard, maybe it’s because I do not have a pedigree that stands out to them, heck, maybe it’s because they dislike my face and hated the product I was thinking of building or what not, Yahoo! was not the easiest company to work with. In fact, it made me want to short their stock (I own their stock).
“We don’t think of ourselves as a portal company anymore. We think of ourselves as a communications application platform,” said Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo’s vice president of product strategy in a recent article on Yahoo! trying to win over the geek crowd.
I used Yahoo! because they seemed less likely to outright steal my idea and duplicate it than Google. In the end, I was right. Google launched a very similar servive some 18 months later, click here for that. I do not lose sleep over it because my goal never was to take on Yahoo! and Google in Web, it was to have a good search product for users on the Mojo Supreme network. For more on that, click here.
Anyway, eventually, I decided to replace Yahoo! with a proprietary crawler and index. For the rationale, click here. I think Yahoo! - and other IT companies opening up their goodies - provide entrepreneurs an excellent sandbox to test out ideas and reduce time to market and required investment, but eventually, relying on another company’s IT platform simply does not make sense. Yahoo! and Google are great companies, but realistically, they might be your, partner, acquiror or competitor, so you need some kind of leverage over them. If you think that sounds ballsy well it is and it’s intended to be.
Say we grow our network of media properties to 1, 5, 10 million uniques and do so with our search always being built on Yahoo!’s API, it gives us little leverage in any talks. We’d be handcuffed to Yahoo! forever. That is not so wise. When Overture was forced to sell for $1.5 billion, it was in a corner because Yahoo! was driving much of their traffic, it could have cut them off, reduced their revenue, thus their market cap… John Battelle covered this well in The Search. Bill Gross (Overture’s backer through Idealad) had no choice but to sell then.
All to say, Yahoo!’s problem is not even the quality of their APIs, those are world class (even though in some search categories, the quality is better now than when it was on Yahoo’s API). The problem is trying to get anyone there to show signs of life.
Think about it: again, consider me and our product to be crap, but just for argument’s sake, had Yahoo! been showing some signs of life, then at least they could have asked us if we wanted to partner with them and bring our domain specific vertical search to market faster, on a larger scale. At least it would have beaten Google to the punch (since Google did offer something similar ages later - ages being relative to Web speed).
In the end, they were slow and disinterested. Subsequent calls and emails to get them to work with us on monetization (our traffic is growing 70% per month, you would think they would want seal that deal before we get too large and go to Ask (who’s yet to launch their own paid clicks product but will eventually) or MSN (who’s launching its AdCenter this month) or Google who is crushing Yahoo! and steals clients right and left.
In the end, I got tired of waiting for Yahoo! to wake up, so we decided to build our own IT platform with an open source search software. And you know what: it was the best call we made.
Long story short, Yahoo! made a half-ass attempt to open up its APIs but instead of getting the business people, PR people to run with the case studies and win over the geek crowd against Google, it only alienated them.
Just our experience with Yahoo!
Disclosure: I own shares in Yahoo!
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