Should Yahoo rework their search engine or just let Microsoft handle it?

I think Yahoo can start by bringing back the old Geocities webhosting. People get attracted to one form or the other. Blogger is way boring and only Wordpress seems to overcome that in terms of free blog hosting. Geocities by Yahoo was once the most famous. Aiming for a come back in search engine is quite challenging at this moment. Yahoo if it wants can easily break Blogger. Don't think Bing or Yahoo or any others out there will overthrow Google anytime soon in terms of search engine. The amount of infrastructure that Google has invested in search engine is itself huge!

Though Yahoo! was one of the big name as internet search option around a decade back, however at this moment it seems highly unlikely that they can give an fierce competition to Google or Bing.

Google has become giant, and even Microsoft try to give Google a fight by giving default search engine as Bing in windows.

At this moment Yahoo has nothing exciting in their search engine, that consumers will look back at Yahoo!. In today's world no company could revive the sunset product under the same name, until and unless they launch the new product. So, for Yahoo! as well, Yahoo search can not revive, the max they can do in search world is acquire a new company and then develop their product, to give competition to Google / Bing.

-CB

Anil Jain... it seems highly unlikely that they can give an fierce competition to Google or Bing.

I think they could.

Just now I did a Google <a href="https://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&site=webhp&source=hp&q=crazy%20engineer&pbx=1&oq=&aq=&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=&gs_upl=" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">crazy engineer - Google Search</a> for "crazy engineer" and I got "About 47,100,000 results". Even if I was doing a very serious search and desperately wanted some hard-to-find information, how many of those 47 MILLION web pages would I look at?

The competition isn't in the number of millions of hits, but in consumer trust. There's a lot of disgust at Google for their violation of privacy for profit. Anyone who can offer privacy can compete.

For example, I use #-Link-Snipped-# for all my searches for that very reason. They don't even advertise, but I think they have some market share. Yahoo starts with a good name. I think they could come back if they do it right.

Now people keep saying Google is the best in search engines without any fact to substantiate it. e.g. how many users have actually tried other search engines in last one year (or month or week) and failed to find what they were looking for? One reason why Google might seem like the best is because it tracks user info. and is able to guess what user might want. But I'd rather a search engine gives me what I ask for (a vanilla search experience) than trade my personal info. to advertisers.

Google understands that regular people don't want complex things. They just put up a simple text box in front of them and ask people to type out their mind. In order make sense of what people want, they *must* track the user information. That's why Google's so popular. Unfortunately - that's exactly the way Google's rivals are approaching the search problem - tracking user information and then presenting search results based on their past history, +1s, ads they've clicked on and so on.

I'm not sure if search results will be better if Google stopped personalising them.

Kaustubh KatdareGoogle understands that regular people don't want complex things. They just put up a simple text box in front of them and ask people to type out their mind.

How is bing design any complex than Google?

After the acquisition of Tumblr there has not been any news on Google other than their change in Logo design.Yahoo should really focus on revamping its homepage which looks like a pit where more and more unwanted things have been accumulated.We know that Yahoo has one of the best search engines other than Google and Bing and If yahoo can offer customers a simple and fast results as Google is offering,Yahoo have a good chance.Before that It has to implement good thought about yahoo in customers mind and try to make it homepage by creative methods as many search engines do.