Google might be the dominant force when it comes to search, but when it comes to financial news and information, Yahoo is king.
Check the two sites out and you’ll see the differences immediately:
This doesn’t come as a surprise to me. Yahoo has always been my homepage, and everyone else I know as well, because when you go to Yahoo, you know you’re getting the latest and greatest news that happening in the world!
More people think of Yahoo as a search company trying to compete with Google. I disagree! I think Yahoo is first a news and information aggregator, and then once people are on the site, then search is a secondary tool for visitors.
That’s a fundamental change from Google who has a primary objective of brining people to the site to get them searching for things. Search is the primary focus at Google whereas news and information is primary at Yahoo.
If Yahoo wants to survive and thrive long term ont the web, then I think they need to continue doing what they’re doing – shedding garbage operations such as Yahoo 360!
Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times article:
Yahoo Finance, which has occupied the top spot in the category for 19 consecutive months, drew 21.7 million unique United States visitors in July; Google Finance drew only 1.2 million unique visitors, placing it 17th in comScore’s rankings for the category, one slot above a site called FreePressRelease.com.
Yahoo understands that information about money — a user’s own money — presents some tricky psychological issues. James Pitaro, vice president of Yahoo’s audience group, said, “In our research with users, we found that the more information that was displayed on the page, the greater the anxiety.”
He said Yahoo deliberately adopted what he calls “the Apple model — simplicity in design; a clean, simple look, not overburdening our users with too much information on the page.”
Google seems to pay no heed to such psychology. Google Finance, which was introduced in 2006 and shed its “beta” label earlier this year, hews to its original strategy: offer the best data and charts. And when that doesn’t work, offer still more data and charts.