Yahoo vs Google, two of the world’s mammoth companies that revolutionized the search engine in their own ways decided to battle each other. Yahoo first began as a search directory in 1994 with the main purpose of providing assistance to people who wanted to find out various things on the internet. The yahoo search engine was very popular in the 90’s acting as a huge archive for information online. But over time Yahoo started concentrating on advertisers rather than its real customers, the huge scores of online users.
In 2000 it slowly started focusing on more and more advertisements and soon became a display page for ads rather than what it was supposed to be. There were about 250 links on the Yahoo homepage in 2004. The cluttering up of ads drove away many users who found better service in the Google search engine. Though Yahoo gradually reduced the number of links, it came too late. Google had a simplicity about it that just couldn’t be beat.
Today we live in the age of social media sites where one can connect to the huge audience that would otherwise be out of reach. Both companies had their own individual strategy to capitalize on the social media phenomenon which led to the Yahoo vs Google strategy war. Yahoo strategy was to strike a partnership between them and the various social media networks. Google on the other hand straight out bought the immensely popular YouTube and decided to explore further into the social media buzz by creating the Google Buzz.
Yahoo may have lost the previous battle but is determined to get back up and running. Instead of building its own social media network, it decided to create partnerships with the all ready existing social networks. Slowly they integrated themselves into the social media networks to produce more web traffic. It partnered with Twitter successfully enabling the users the ability to access their twitter feed when inside Yahoo.
Google on the other hand went for a broader strategy. Even though Google has many social media properties like Blogger, Orkut, Friend Connect, Picasa and YouTube, they have barely managed to stand against the various titans of social media networks. Both of their strategies are very different from one another as Yahoo wants to be integrated into the current social media networks whereas Google wants to build new ones. So far the Yahoo vs Google war has resulted in a draw as both parties have implemented the right strategies for themselves.
