Yahoo seems to be on our minds lately at Onxo. And for good reasons. Pretty much everyone, not users, are dumping on them.
But just to prove everyone wrong, Yahoo comes charging out with three announcements this week so far. First, we know Yang is out. He did what he thought was right for Yahoo and in a perfect world, I agree. Alas, while I'm hopeful we'll get there some day, the world is far from perfect. Yahoo needed vision and Yang did not provide one. Yahoo needed a partner and Yahoo walked away from Microsoft.
All is not lost. This is huge. Yahoo made a deal with T-Mobile USA (apparently T-Mobile's international ops as well) to become the default search engine on T-Mobile's phones. A great coup consider T-Mobile launched the G1 along with Google last month.
That was the second announcement. The third announcement is Yahoo! Glue. What is it? It's their new search result implementation. It provides users with text, images, and other results like videos all on one page. I think it can work well of novice users who are looking for the latest and most commonly searched items. More at Yahoo's search blog.
Will I be using this? Sure, I'll give it a try. It's limited now and Yahoo will need to move fast to increase searchable topics to get folks interested and hooked.
Impact: So long as Yahoo remains in contention, it's all good for mobile warriors. In fact, they are doing better than Microsoft. More competition, the better.
Note: A Yahoo-Microsoft partnership for mobile search might make sense. I would use Microsoft's engine at the back end and Yahoo's front end. Yahoo's UI seems to be more user-friendly and consistent.
Source: Yahoo! Glue, WSJ
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