Here are the highlights from today’s Blogroll dive:
Bryan discovers the difference between e.g. and i.e.
Owen completes a very successful Blogathon 2005.
Michael Heilemann reviews Land of the Dead (2005).
Brian states that independent podcasts …

I like Terry Semel, he helped build Warner Brothers and he took no crap from the geeks at Yahoo when he took over. The man has his secretary print out his email for him to read, he uses the blank side of the page and a ballpoint pen to respond, and he still has a nose for running a technology business.

That being said, Y!’s brand hasn’t been hip since the late nineties and it tends to infect their acquisitions over time. Yes flickr is a raging success, and I expect X1, (Which I rated as the best desktop search add-on long before Y! bought it, it’s a champ which beats the heck out of the still buggy MSN Desktop Search and that piece of nonsense from Google) and Konfabulator to be success too.

The thing is that just like flickr these products will probably only thrive by being as un-Yahoo! like as possible. With Flickr we see where Yahoo is smart and companies like Sun (Who bought Watson) and Microsoft (Hotmail) are stupid, they realise that Flickr is the brand. If they make X1 (Or whatever it’ll end up being called as X1 is still owned by the company they bought the code from) and Konfabulator the brand, then those will do fine too.

Yahoo! “Whatever” appears to be the kiss of death though, there are a litany of also ran products which are pre-fixed with the Y! and they tended to be ignored by consumers.

So you have the darling of Wall Street facing down the company everyone wants to see take a kicking, while Yahoo! sits out in the cold posting solid numbers (Yawn!) and buying fantastic little apps (X1 Search and Konfabulator) which become uncool the moment they touch them.

I think that’s incredibly harsh, how exactly is Konfabulator uncool because Y! bought it. As far as I’m concerned it just meant I could have free access to the software. Likewise Flickr didn’t change when Y! bought it, well I lie it did change, Pro members got more.

If I was in the market to buy shares in either company then I’d go with Y! Don’t get me wrong I love Google, but things like Google News just show they don’t have a clue how to make money out of half of what they have going on.

As for search engines, AltaVista, followed by Yahoo!, followed by Excite, followed by Google. Simply because at the time those were the search engines that people trusted to get the job done. I chose my search engines by following the eyeballs, the more eyeballs the better the chances are that the results are indicative of what really was out there.

With search I think trust is a big part of it, do your peers trust it? If they do then the chances are you will too.

I hate to admit it, but it’s the truth… I haven’t done any comparison search engines in a long time!

As for your site stats (and mine) - I wonder how much has to do with optimising sites in proportion to their market share? In other words Google has the lions share of search engine users and therefore a lot of the optimisation I do is aimed at google… any opinions?

apologies about the link - I have fixed it now.

Yahoo’s problem is that they are run like a grown up business by an adult, Terry Semel

Is that a problem necessarily? I mean if they are posting solid numbers, they are doing something right - we saw in dot bomb how not posting solid numbers can be a tad shortsighted even you are cool!

However, this all strays away from the Which Search Engine do you use, and why?

Yes they turn over more revenue than Google, but Yahoo! doesn’t have any heat, and Microsoft is the company everybody loves to hate. So you have the darling of Wall Street facing down the company everyone wants to see take a kicking, while Yahoo! sits out in the cold posting solid numbers (Yawn!) and buying fantastic little apps (X1 Search and Konfabulator) which become uncool the moment they touch them.

Yahoo’s problem is that they are run like a grown up business by an adult, Terry Semel, a guy who got rid of the skunkworks culture Google still embraces, but ensured the company didn’t develop the teenage petulance of those in Redmond. (Or in Cupertino, or in Redwood Shores)