Let me start this off by stating that I am a long timeGoogle power user.
Google handles all of my daily web searching, email, chat, RSS feeds, blog monetization, etc. In my opinion, it blows Yahoo (and most other Internet companies) clear out of the water. However, there are a select few services that I regularly turn to Yahoo for. Why? It’s either because Yahoo does it better, or because Google doesn’t offer it.
Here are the only 7 things Yahoo does better than Google:
- Personal Finance - Yahoo Finance contains a great wealth of original content that easily rivals some of the biggest financial sites in the game (CNN Money, TheStreet.com, etc.). The interface is equally intuitive and accessible to both new investors and longtime financial gurus. Google Finance is coming along, but it isn’t quite up to par just yet.
- Answers to Questions – Yahoo Answers allows users to ask questions or answer other user’s questions; A simple concept that works well for Yahoo. Google has no such active service. The closest competition on the web right now is Ask MetaFilter… also a great question/answer service.
- Website Backlink Info – Most webmasters like to know exactly how many sites are linking to their various websites. Yahoo makes this especially easy with their “linkdomain:” search operator. It quickly provides a full list of incoming links to any given domain. For some reason Google does not publicly disclose this backlink information, but instead provides a small sample of quality incoming links to a given domain via it’s “link:” search operator. Google does provide Google Webmaster Tools that will give you backlink information for a specific domain once you sign up and prove to Google that you are the owner of the domain.
- Image Hosting and Sharing - With its recent purchase of Flickr, Yahoo now rules the Web 2.0 photo sharing market. Flickr is currently the king over all the other photo sharing sites out there. Although, lets not forget that Google rules the Web 2.0 video sharing market withYouTube.
- Local Search – If you are looking for businesses around your town or city, Yahoo Local is a step ahead of Google. While Google can perform local searches in a variety of different ways through their standard search interface and Google Maps application, Yahoo Local is a more polished service that puts all local search capabilities on one convenient page. Yahoo local is sort of like a digital Yellow/White Pages.
- Entertainment Portal – From music to online games to sports, Yahoo provides a solid entertainment web portal capable of satisfying various entertainment and leisure user demographics. For better or for worst, Google isn’t trying to be an entertainment portal, so it doesn’t even come close to competing with Yahoo in this regard.
- Privacy Policy - Yahoo is arguably better with the privacy concerns of its users. Certainly this point could be debated in favor of either company, but there seems to be more public controversy surrounding Google’s privacy policies. Like most, I suck it up and use Google’s services anyway. I do, however, have a Yahoo Mail account that I use to communicate with other bloggers concerning blog monetization strategies that may include Google’s Adwords service. I figure, why let Google have access to that info too?
So what does Google do better than Yahoo? Well, that’s easy… every conceivable task other than the 7 points listed above. Of course, that’s just my opinion… 
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JULY 7TH, 2007 @ 4:16 PM BY: MARC
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