Yahoo vs Google
My previous post was about why I switched from Netflix to Blockbuster. Eric Colson was a coworker of mine at Yahoo for the last 5 years, but a couple of months ago he left and joined Netflix :).
Below is an account of which Yahoo vs Google services he now uses (text that follows is what Eric sent to me with very minor edits):
So, in response to you switching form Netflix to BlockBuster, I would post the following … but I don’t have a blog 🙂
Here’s a summary of changes I have made since leaving yahoo. None of it was deliberate …etc. I just started venturing out of Yahoo now that i don’t work there and found that I prefer some others. Take it as customer feedback 🙂
- Email: no change… Sticking with Yahoo due to my account. I do have a gmail account, but only use it occasionally. I did have to turn off the Y! beta because it broke too much!
- Maps/Local: switched to Google “most of the time”. Its better performance, and “usually” better index of local businesses. However, I do like Yahoo’s “send to phone” feature (not sure if G has the equivalent).
- Web Search — hybrid. Its about 50-50 now.
- I use Google as a default for researching topics simply because its faster .. the performance is hands-down much better than Y!.
- I do like Google’s clean page better as well.
- I think the algo relevancy is about the same between the two.
- When I am interested in paid search listings (commercial queries), I use Google just because it has mind-share for advertisers.
- Yahoo is better for spelling suggestions (which i need a lot)
- I still use yahoo search a lot because I use the yahoo toolbar a lot (see toolbar section)
- I also use Yahoo search a lot because of the open shortcuts. I even use it to get to my Google services :). Really- i have a shortcut for “!gdocs” to get me to my Google Document repository
- Toolbar – i have both, but use yahoo more so that i can leverage my open shortcuts
- Bookmarks/Social Search — I still use Y! myweb … can’t beat it 🙂
- Documents (Word processing and spreadsheets) – I use Google docs. Yahoo has no equivalent. I did replace some of my yahoo “notepad” docs with Google docs and rarely use Y! briefcase now
- Notepad — despite, the fact that I moved *some* of the longer notes to Google docs, i still use yahoo notepad. This is just because it so simple. Google has a notepad widget, but for whatever reason, i don’t like.
- Finance – Yahoo (love the new beta and streaming quotes)
- News – neither Y! nor G … bloglines (thanks amr for telling me about it)
- Shopping – yahoo … hate frugal … but still don’t like Y! Shopping either. It always seems to fail me when I have a simple task for comparison shopping … or to sort a list of items …etc.
- Travel – abandoned Y! Travel for sidestep (tried it because Rob Solomon went there.. ended up liking it)
- Browser … I switched to Firefox. This has nothing to do with Y! or G, but just could not take IE crashing anymore.
- Movie Rentals … Netflix of course… i have a free account with 8 movies out at once.