A Yahoo/Google Competitive Product Matrix

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Yahoo’s been cranking out websites since 1995. Google showed up in 1998 and after the turn of the century started to build out a lot more products, some of them search-based, some of them not.

This got me curious about where these companies are respectively. Google is clearly the Search king, but what about in other areas, particularly media sites. Do people use them? I did an inventory of all the significant Yahoo and Google sites, found some data on their performance relative to each other. The results were very surprising in some cases.

Here they are.

My observations:

  • Google is the search leader. They are the #1 web search engine and have a lot more search verticals (Books, Patents, etc.) than Yahoo. Surprisingly, Google does not have an audio search.
  • In every Media product except Video (YouTube), Google is a no-show. Yahoo dominates. Google News is #5, Google Finance is #40. They have very little in Movies and no TV or Sports content – at least as of today.
  • Gmail (#3) and Google Maps (#3) have more mind share than users. People have told me they think they are market leaders.
  • Google has some really weird products that don’t really fit anywhere like Earth and Web Accelerator. On the other hand, Yahoo Broadway and Pets are way out there too.
  • Many of Google’s products are not monetized in any way.
  • Google Base provides some offering in a bunch of areas, but it’s listings only. Yahoo generally has content and some kind of application around the product (like Trip itinerary sharing) that makes it a much stronger offering.
  • Many of Google’s products are customized searches. They’re bare-bones and fast, but do users want more?

Tracking down publicly available metrics was hard. Except for Web Search, Neilsen/Comscore/Compete/HitWise don’t give out this data without some money exchanging hands. If you know of any, especially for the highlighted services, let me know.

More data I hope to add: date of each site’s launch; Microsoft Sites.

13 Comments

  2. I’d be curious to see AOL as part of the matrix, especially since they opened up and some of their sites (like News) have been climbing in the rankings. Google, Y, and MSN are the sexy portals that get all the ink, but I have a feeling that AOL is not to be overlooked.

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  4. Great overview. Y! has moe assets than most people realize.

    On minor quibble, you left del.icio.us out of the Y! product list

    Another interesting comparison would be to look at international reach. This comparison seems largely US focused.

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  5. besides the fact we have the same name, lol. the info you found is so correct I was looking into audio on google as well and there relevence there is nothing compared to yahoo. good info here.

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  6. Great work, excellent breakdown. Wow that’s a lot of projects. I’m using Google Mashup Editor and Yahoo Pipes both which were left both off your spreadsheet.

    Steve

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  11. re desktop search – anyone has the installer for the previous version (not the X1 trial and not the new beta)?
    I tried them both. The X1 trial made my computer hang on occasions when hibernating, and I absolutely hate the web-based UI of the new beta (plus – it’s super slow compared to the old version).
    The previous version was excellent. I should have kept the installer before reinstalling my machine 🙁

    Thanks,
    Dror.

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