The space is ripe for upheaval.
There's a field where Google has been doing slightly worse as time goes by: questionable search. It's a running joke by now that Bing's video search is much better for searching porn that Youtube. Similarly, searching for "<band> full album mp3 download" on Google is bound to return useless websites. Sometimes the actual results are to be found inside the text of a DMCA takedown notice, meaning that Google has the result, but refuses to show it to you.
And speaking of bad results, some specific terms (such as moving companies) are so full of SEO garbage that there's no way to get a reliable result.
There's definitely room for competition - otherwise, DuckDuckGo would have been out of business by now.
We're not talking about handset A vs. B. The technical and talent lead is much deeper wrt. Google and Machine Learning.
If you haven't yet, check out the bottom of the page, in particular "Guidelines", "FAQ" and the search bar. Also, helpful formatting tips:
https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
> bad manners will be corrected. I guarantee that.
We'll hold you to your words. Do so, or the downvotes will follow. ;).
Wha?? I use it daily for the last 10+ years - I despise it, but for some reason there's nothing better afaik. And it would be so easy to make it so much better, no surprise the company is failing.
Sounds like she's in a tough spot. You're pretty much forced into a situation of focusing on the good numbers when you're a public company or you'll get beaten up by the shareholders and shorts. So it's difficult to shine sunlight on the bad stuff to disinfect because that's not what public investors want to hear.
Going into search? That's just crazy talk. Google has the space completely wrapped up.
I think Yahoo has some excellent properties like finance.yahoo.com which is amazing and could unlock a deluge of cash with the right biz model. Retail investors visit the site in droves daily. Right now it's an advertising disaster. Prime space taken up by spammy link-baity ads injected into the main center content: "10 most popular fitness models on the planet". And prime spaces on the right taken up by amazon ads. The most targeted ads by etrade, scottrade and ameritrade are the smallest ads on the page with tiny icons on the left. They relaunched yahoo finance in September and sounds like their users hate the new site: https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/315477-finance-dd-3
The WSJ article isn't going to make life at Yahoo any easier unfortunately.