Yahoo! web! traffic! BIGGER! THAN! GOOGLE! in! July! Historians looking back on 2013 might want to call it the Marissa Mayer Effect. Others, more accurately, could attribute Yahoo!'s web traffic leap ahead of Google in the US in July to largely being a hat-tip to, er, Google. Mayer, of course, is a Google alumnus and knows a thing or two about driving traffic to web properties …
I had the same thought. Yahoo Answers in particular is a great source of not very real traffic. It contains just about every keyword on Earth, and being part of Yahoo automatically gets high pagerank, so it's like a black hole of search engine clicks.
Pity that 99% of the time all I can do with Answers is read the answer, roll my eyes, and go back to find a site with usable information. I doubt it's much in the way of a revenue machine, and almost surely unprofitable to run. It'd be worth distinguishing between engaged traffic and there-by-accident traffic.
It keeps being said, this "joke" of putting an exclamation point after every word is deader than Paris Hilton's eyes. This site used to serve up fresh articles with witty humor. I have to say when I look at my feed now it is stale puns interspersed with product reviews for phones; hardly food for the mind.
I Use DuckDuckGo, but then , it IS the default on Linux Mint so I expect BILLIONS of users do not bother to change it....
I'd add an 'I'll get me coat ' icon, but everyone knows it's the mac with the paperback from a well known publisher in the pocket....
(so many puns, so little time...)
I was one of the people taking their traffic away from Google. The reason I did it, though, is that Google is becoming less of a useful search engine. Spammers have got deep hooks in there and for some stuff, most of the first page is advertisements barely distinguished from search results.
At least in my case, this is not a 'thumbs up' for Yahoo rather than a 'thumbs down' for Google. If I had gotten and trusted the answer I was looking for from Google, I would not have gone elsewhere.
Link farms are still an issue and it almost seems as if Google has decided that some link farms are OK, even though they know what they are.
I've often wondered why yahoo.co.uk tolerate that neo-nazis have overrun their comments section. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go to UK Yahoo! and read the comments to any news article. Any at all. It's wall-to-wall "ALL PAKIS MUST BURN! NUKE PAKISTAN!" in there.
Even Youtube have largely kicked out the nazis, and you *know* you have a PR problem when your commentators would be too horrible for Youtube.
I would be very interested in seeing how much if this traffic was to Yahoo! News articles. As you note, Yahoo! & comments on their articles are the mainstream right wing racism website (equalling or exceeding even Fox News) and their visitors hate Obama and the government in general. With the Snowden stuff going on, all the right wing nutters have a place to hang out and scream drivel at each other.
Did Edward Snowden save Yahoo! It's certainly possible he helped a lot!
I'm finding myself in doubt about the veracity of those numbers. Sure, I'm one of the people who stopped using Google (at least directly) this July. But I also taught my kids how to completely remove the Yahoo! toolbar from their machines when it gets stealithy installed during each Java update*. So these stats are really inexplicable, and more than a little suspicious to me.
*What, you thought Yahoo! got on your machines via the CNET download site? Au contraire, mon amie. It was actually Oracle who acted as the Trojan Horse for the big Y! Seems while all of us were fretting over the latest zero-day exploit our friends in the Big Silo were turning what should have been a crushing embarrassment into a golden business opportunity.
@Phil from Raleigh
I forgot about that atrocious toolbar nonsense. I think there should be criminal penalties for that obvious corruption of people's systems against their will. Don't get me started... That surely must have had an effect and now it looks pumpy/dumpy a little.
@btrower
First to get the penalty is Google. Their toolbar was the bane of IT engineers everywhere for years during the XP-era. I f((king hate that stupid bloody toolbar.
I never had a situation where I couldn't say 'No' to the Yahoo! toolbar - as annoying as those requests were....but the Google toolbar was insidious and appeared everywhere, unasked for.
I've got a yahoo account for spam, never been bothered by their toolbar.
But then I have more than 3 neurons and disable toolbar installers unless it's one I really want.
Also, Yahoo News is getting a bit more attention these days. One article a week hitting Drudge is probably more than enough to drive their unique visitors count up.
Couple that with more and more people realizing Google hoovers up more information about them than the NSA and you'll notice some changes in behavior.
as an ATT broadband customer my web email interface is yahoo .. my "master" yahoo ID is some dumb thing I used for a geocities website .. right now I haven't transferred my email client accounts from one PC to the one I'm using now .. so I go through the 4 accounts I have with ATT through the web .. I suppose those count as visitors to Yahoo! .. though it's about 10 minutes a week .. one I've not checked in weeks .. while I'm doing business with my gmail account .. which is up on my PC regularly through the day .. and notifies my on my Galaxy S3 where I can read and reply as well .. do web design and have a web master account with Google .. watch quite a bit of youtube .. use other Google services occasionally .. Google+
so while I may be a visitor .. and it is my providers web front .. I don't "use" Yahoo! for anything .. don't spend any time on their web properties that I'm aware of .. getting rarer to see Yahoo! News! links even ..
It sort of doesn't matter how those page views came about, but the fact there are more on Y! than on Google means Yahoo can once again say it has the largest advertising network in the world. If you're an advertiser, and you want to get your brand noticed, then you can't ignore Yahoo, just because you personally use Google to do your web searching.
Yahoo may be many things, and may not be many others. However, the world needs more choices than just Google, so I for one hope they can (continue) to provide it.
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