On the Soapbox

Yahoo!'s search incentives

A writer at C|Net has reported that Yahoo! is considering offering incentives to people who use Yahoo! as their primary search engine. Here is an excerpt of a survey that Yahoo! sent to some of its users:

Yahoo! is considering launching a program to reward people who make Yahoo! their primary search engine. Yahoo! Mail users will be given early access to this program. You will receive a monthly reward if you make Yahoo! your primary search engine. This means that most of the searching you do each month must be on Yahoo! Search. To ensure users receive credit for all searches conducted on Yahoo!, you may need to log in or use a search box specifically designed for this program (e.g., a Yahoo! rewards toolbar).

I thought that Yahoo! had given up on the search engine wars and is going to now concentrate on services instead? Whatever the case, I think that this is an interesting idea; we are simply starting to see some of the same marketing tactics of the traditional economy being adopted by the new economy. There is one thing that strikes me as a sticky issue, though: there is no foolproof way for them to be sure that you use Yahoo! for "most" of your searches. They can tell how many times you use Yahoo! search per month and then grant you rewards if you pass a certain threshold, but there is no way whatsoever that they can be sure that, at the same time, you used Yahoo! more than you used Google and thus "most" of the time. Since they will have to do this rewards program based on the raw number of searches, this invites other problems. According to Google's handy search history tool, I performed 26 unique searches yesterday. I would imagine that for casual users, that number would be less. For people who do a lot of searching, it would thus be easy to do the minimum necessary for Yahoo! and then use Google for the rest. In the extreme case, I could picture myself rigging up a simple program that will send a number of random search requests to Yahoo! each day, thus fulfilling the requirement without me actually touching the Yahoo! search engine; obviously, this would be undesirable for Yahoo!, but countering it is no trivial matter.

Anyway, enough about that. So what kinds of rewards are they thinking about offering?

• No Yahoo! Mail ads: This is worthwhile, but then again, it is only because Yahoo! uses graphical ads and, even worse, animated Flash ads. Google ads are not only more pleasing to the eye, but they have actually been useful on occasion.
• Unlimited Yahoo! mail storage: If you are anywhere close to using up the 2.6+ (and growing) gigabytes of storage that Gmail offers, please raise your hand...
• Outlook access to Yahoo! Mail: Ahem. Ya know, Gmail offers this for free.
• Five free music downloads each month
• Discounted music subscription
• Donations to charity
• PC to phone calling credit
• Netflix discount
• Discounted Yahoo! Personals
• Frequent Flyer Miles: Yep, they threw in the kitchen sink.

Not too bad; I guess could see myself springing for some of these offers, if all it took was for me to do some searching...

Taking Yahoo! Mail Beta out for a spin

In other news, I finally got invited to try out Yahoo! Mail Beta. This is the new mail product that people have been buzzing about for a while now as the Gmail-killer, so I have been quite anxious to see what all the fuss is about. Like many Gmail and many other products, it uses asynchronous JavaScript (AJAX) for smoother user interaction. Unlike Gmail, which tried to redefine the mail experience by introducing many features that average users were uncomfortable with (e.g., replacing folders with labeling and getting rid of the delete button), Yahoo! Mail emulates the Outlook Express interface so that people will get something that they are familiar with. I have to admit, the whole thing looks very slick and shiny, with a tabbed interface to switch between composition drafts and your mailboxes and even a spiffy drag-and-drop interface. The Gmail interface took a bit to get used to, so for Yahoo! to offer something more traditional is advantageous. The integrated RSS reader is a pretty cool feature that I wish Gmail had. Unfortunately, Yahoo! reported an error when I tried to add some feeds; well, it is a beta (if Google could just integrate Google Reader into Gmail, that would be wonderful).

That is about as far as my love affair with this beta will go, however. My biggest gripe is that the slick interface comes at a hefty cost: responsiveness. The interface seemed very sluggish and unresponsive, and any form of rich text scrolling is annoyingly slow. After clicking the inbox, I had to wait a couple of seconds for it to show up. Mind you, I am using a fast and stable broadband connection and a decent modern processor (2.8 GHz P4 with 1.5 GB RAM). When loading the inbox, the usage meter on one of my virtual processors (HT) shot up to 100% for the duration of the load. Not only does Gmail load the inbox in less than a second, Gmail barely registers a blip on my CPU monitor. I then tried Yahoo! Mail Beta on my old 800 MHz laptop, and the process of loading and starting Yahoo! Mail Beta not only caused the CPU usage meter to hit 100%, but it remained at 100% (rendering the computer unusable) for the entire duration of the startup, which took a remarkable 57 seconds (vs. 7 seconds for Gmail on this same laptop; startup times were 15 seconds vs. 2 seconds for my P4). This is e-mail, not Adobe Photoshop for goodness sakes! Gmail's minimalist interface may lack slickness, but it is fast, responsive, and efficient, and when you are using e-mail day in and day out, what matters the most? That you have nicely shaded tabs or that you have a nice, responsive interface? For Gmail users who like to use a traditional interface, Gmail offers free and secure POP3/SMTP access, which will allow you to use software like Outlook Express with Gmail; Yahoo! wants you to pay for this. Gmail also allows people to specify different "From:" addresses, so that I could use my Gmail account to both send and receive mail for kailiu.com. Lacking this feature, Yahoo! would allow you to receive this sort of mail, but not to send it. Oh, and the ads in Yahoo! Mail Beta are neither useful or unintrusive (can we say Flash animation?). So while I am truly very, very impressed as a programmer with the fact that they were able to build such a slick and familiar interface using JavaScript, Yahoo! Mail Beta is simply unusable. It is great eye candy, but that is about it. Gmail took risks when it abandoned a number of traditions of e-mail interfaces, but now I see that they were right in doing what they did: they were able to build an interface that was intuitive in its own way and that was suitable for the web medium. By clinging to old interface styles, Yahoo! stuck with an interface that is not really suitable for the web, and while they managed to pull it off, it does not really work.