What will it take to turn Yahoo! around?

dearmarissamayer.com

In all seriousness, I can’t imagine anything she could do to save it. But I’m a pretty big Google fan boy. Mayer was Google’s 20th employee, and seems to have some vision. I’d like to see Yahoo rise from the ashes. It would be nice to have another player – whether in search, social, or something unique.

Yahoo! is my homepage.

I’d prefer less pop up ads (mine get blocked but they slow the page), more current/breaking news stories, maps to be a one click side button…It should just be streamlined & easier with fewer clicks to get info fast.

I can’t think of anything else right off the top of my head.

Medicine balls.

They need to totally revamp their approach to advertising and eliminate it as much as possible. At the very least, they need to make it much less obtrusive. Less is more, I think. Less advertising, more eyeballs, more revenue per eyeball.

They need to improve their advertising algorithms to give people more targeted ads. They have to outdo Google as far as that is concerned. They have to make it so advertising is not like advertising.

I started with Yahoo, and only switched to Google later on, when yahoo became too commercial and wasted too much of my time.

Yahoo is also too hokey. It’s name, unfortunately, conjures up an idiot. Like only idiots use Yahoo. Not much they can do about that, I guess, but maybe they could hire a brand manager that could find a way to upgrade their image. Right now they sound like Walmart of the internet while being the Kmart of the internet.

Google sounds like the Nordstrom’s of the internet while it is the Walmart of the internet. Somehow Yahoo has to change that around. Then need a premium product at an economical price. Either that, or they need to give in and do everything on the cheap and just accept what they can get.

Yahoo News often just has to do with celebrities, unless it’s something really big. I know a lot of people are interested in that, but the huge scale of people making a certain place their homepage doesn’t amount up to that. Having normal every day news you can quickly look up on the site while checking your mail and getting ready for work, I think would help. It’s also my homepage, but I go elsewhere for news, since I can’t seem to care who married what and which star wore some unsavory dress for some awards I don’t give a shit about. All that Yahoo has left for me at the moment is that I made my e-mail account there years ago.

Also all of Yahoo’s features and tools are as ancient as the sun, and besides taking new features already used by other big places long after those were implemented, it seems to refuse to advance passed what was awesome in like, 2001. I remember when Google buffed up their image search features, it was months after that Yahoo did the same, and even other places like Bing got around to it quicker than they did.

In my personal opinion, it needs to have something new and innovative, although frankly I have no idea what. And it needs better news, news for the common peasant such as I.

@Symbeline Ohhhkay…you really got to me with that new avatar. Whenever she flies, she mesmerizes me, along with Bernstein’s powerful music. I just freeze! : )

If I say something stupid here, forgive me. I’m ignorant and stupid that’s all. Yahoo should go retail. Start selling like how Amazon does it. Yahoo Agora? Then there could also be something like Yahoo Chic, selling products with designs that make people giggle with delight. Like that successful website, Fab.com.

Yahoo could also come up with a social network. A crossbreed between Facebook and Fluther. Or maybe just Fluther! Invest in creating the most sophisticated language translation software ever where people all over the world with computers could communicate typing in their own languages.

I also have this concept for a retail website that might be worth billions if executed right by Yahoo. Lol. @ETpro, I’ll share it with you if you ask me. : )

Getting boughtby Google.,,,

@mazingerz88 Yeah I totally love that movie haha. The music certainly rocks too, but some parts of it sound like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. XD

My take is Yahoo’s strategy was always to get the most slack-jawed morons it could: basically, the cruft that wasn’t going to leave AOL until AOL literally wasn’t useable anymore. Seriously, if you get any dumber than the Yahoo!Answers crowd you wouldn’t even be able to tie your shoes much less use a keyboard. Yahoo! News is celebrity gossip for people who can’t get their grimy, booger fingers around a Rupert Murdoch tabloid rag. The forums are full of complete illiterates. The IM service is mostly just a bunch of spambots spamming each other. One of the few “useful” products Yahoo still offers is the finance section.

It’s a safe bet the apes people Yahoo spent its time attracting are the very people who do most poorly in recessions. Nothing else comes close to the stupidity on Yahoo!. They aren’t the bland types with low-to-middling IQs who can’t wait to get their booger-caked hands on Apple’s useless products. They’re not even engaged enough to follow something as mind-numbingly dumb as Drudge or Fox News. Despite the stupidity seen in its comments, at least YouTube has a largely useful product that makes avoiding crap relatively easy.

@bolwerk Hey. Tell us how you really feel about Yahoo. ;-).

Yahoo is still my home page. I have Yahoo finance, email, tech news, world news, weather, and important bookmarks displayed when I go there. I use Firefox and shut off all pop ups, and accept no 3rd party cookies. I don’t get ads. It’s quick and I don’t feel like they’re peeking into my shorts to see whether I scratched my left or right nut. (Hey Google – It was the left one!) My Yahoo email does not open up any ads. Maybe, like Google, they are looking at my email but at least they do not make it as obvious.

If Yahoo stressed Privacy they might get more users.

@LuckyGuy I have the AdBlocker Chrome extension downloaded and don’t see any ads in Google. And by the way, it was the right boob I just scratched.

@janbb I have Adblocker and PrivacyChoice on and they work great.
Google bugs me because I get the feeling they want to own me. I have both google and yahoo accounts and the feeling is very different.
I just checked your IP address and Google says you’re running low on tuna fish. There’s some on sale 2.8 miles from your house.

@LuckyGuy Full disclosure: I have a weak spot in my heart for Google because they are paying the bills for my son to live in Paris. But I take your point. (hmmm)

Yahoo needs to hire enough employees to provide better costumer service. My husband jokes that there are no human employees at Yahoo, it is nothing but a huge, automated machine.

@tom_g It may be a bridge too far, but I really doubt it. Revenues have sagged a bit, but this isn’t the strongest economy and there’s a lot there to build on. I think it’s a doable thing, just very, very far from easy.

@SpatzieLover It isn’t my home page, Chrome’s most visited is in Chrome, and Bing is in Firefox. But I drop by daily.

@janbb Ha! And Marissa hasn’t even called to schedule flying me out there yet! Lest people wonder WTF you’re talking about, it’s this NSFW thread.

@wundayatta A tough assignment, but then I believe she got a package valued at $70 million with salary and stock. Clearly, the board will be expecting success at a tough assignment.

@Symbeline I prefer Google news plus my local ABC affiliate for local news and weather. I do check Yahoo headlines occasional, but even as a Yahoo! Small Business Partner, it’s not my prime news destination.