My 7 year-old niece knew what Google is. She knows it's the website we go to whenever something needs to be researched. She knows what YouTube is. It's the site where we can watch thousands of Lady Gaga videos which she totally love. Heck, she even knows what Microsoft is, as she can read it everytime we turn the computer on. To our surprise, she also knows Yahoo!. For her, Yahoo! is synonymous to the messenger she used to talk to her dad working abroad.
During the 90s, my teacher would give us assignments and will tell us to search it on Yahoo!. But that was more than a decade ago. For many years now, Yahoo! has lost millions of its original users who uses the site's original purpose - search. Apparently those who defected gave their loyalty to Google. Younger generations are even more positive with associating Bing as a search engine than Yahoo!.
Yahoo! is not a 'has been', however, in the online world. It is widely popular for its Entertainment pages and world news updates. It also still dominates the E-mail service industry with its YahooMail and YMail. Its Yahoo! Messenger is just as popular. But Yahoo! as a search engine is like a hot coffee in a desert. It just doesn't fit and the people are not use to it.
But Yahoo! is still holding onto good. They still hope one day their search glory days will come again. And they do not have any plans of turning their search services off. During a search event hosted by Yahoo! earlier this week, an official was quoted saying, "Yahoo has been in search, is in search, and will be in search in the future,".
Sure, they will still be in the search business for the next couple of years. But unless they make a good noise for themselves, renew their strategy, and even redesign their cluttered homepage, Yahoo! as a search will never topple Google from the top. Nor will it be remembered for that purpose.
