Editors Note:Â As part of our continued effort at diversifying contributors to Online Marketing Blog and providing a public communication platform for our merry band of search marketing enthusiasts, here is a post from Blog SEO and Designer, Thomas McMahon:
Yahoo is by many accounts, the grandfather of search. They’ve been around a long time and have quite a few popular services to offer but continue to trail behind Google in many areas. I’m a fan of Yahoo and think there are a few things that could make Yahoo better. Here are a few of the improvements I’d like to see Yahoo implement to make them a better search engine:
- Less Graphical Ads – A huge turn off is all the big banner ads, especially in the email portion. I can handle text ads, and even some well made non-animated graphical ads, but I’m tired of the mortgage ads and the annoying Flash ads.
- Single Sign-on – If I log into Yahoo Mail, why can’t I go to Flickr and be logged in too?
- iCalendar – It’d be great to see Yahoo Calendar play well with others. The iCalendar format is open source and works with many desktop online applications. Make it even better by allowing users to publish/sync iCalendar feeds to Yahoo’s calendar and I bet you’d get some Google Calendar users.
- Spam Filtering – What I’d like to see done with Yahoo Mail is a spam filter that learns from the users as whole. If 1000 other Yahoo users mark a message as spam, my version is probably spam too. I get so much spam that doesn’t get caught that it’s ridiculous.
- Flickr – Now that Yahoo owns Flickr, they need to remove the upload limit. I hit my 200 photos and am not allowed to upload more without paying. So I switched to a different service instead. I’d gladly come back though.
- Yahoo Messenger – The Windows IM client is so chalked full of ads and other features that it’s no fun to use. The Mac version though has no ads and nothing but chat. It’s so much nicer.
- Site Explorer – While the Yahoo Site Explorer is a good start, it’d be great to get actual stats or information other than just pages and links. I hate to say it, but more like Google Webmaster Central. Also, I’d be nice to be able to download all my links. The export option is nice, but one can only get 50 links at a time. If you have 5,000 links, that’s going to take forever.
- LAUNCHcast – Way back in the day, I use to really enjoy listening to music on Launch. However, now when I try to listen, it tells me I need Mac OS 8.5 or 9 (not OS X) and Netscape 4.5 (not 6+) and Windows Media Player 7+. I can deal with the Windows Media requirement, but the other two? Are you kidding me? It’s also not available in Firefox on Windows.
- MyYahoo Widgets – It’d be sweet to have Yahoo Widget Engine widgets on my MyYahoo page. I need some sort of added functionality as it currently seems like I can only get Yahoo modules or RSS feeds. I do have to say though that the MyYahoo makeover that’s coming does look really nice. Now, about the functionality.
Yahoo is a great company, but these are just a few things that could make it even better for users of it’s services. What are your Yahoo wishes?
