Yahoo’s New Mission Statement: We Are Not Google

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In response to Google’s new tagline, Yahoo retools its mission statement to reconcile its recent social media acquisitions with its origin as a human-edited directory: To connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge. Clearly, Yahoo wants to come off as more “human” than Google, whose mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

With this mission statement, Yahoo tries to differentiate itself from Google on three levels:

1) Man versus machine — “Passions” versus “information”.
2) Push versus pull — “Connecting” people to things versus making things “universally accessible and useful” to people.
3) Portal versus search — Yahoo’s already ceded “accessible and useful” search of “the world’s information” to Google, so they’ve decided to “connect” you with a hodgepodge of “passions”, “communities”, and “knowledge”.

So there you have it, folks. If you like a human-pushed portal, use Yahoo. If you like machine-pulled search, use Google.

I don’t like pushy humans. I, for one, welcome our new machine overlord.

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10 Responses to “Yahoo’s New Mission Statement: We Are Not Google”

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  • Mohit Bhushan says: Mohit Bhushan

    Funny thing Mike, I see the contrast between knowledge and information. I don’t know about Yahoo!! but I regard the two as quite different from each other. It is a worthy goal if Yahoo!! understands the gravity of the task.

  • Distant Sparks says: Distant Sparks

    “I don’t like pushy humans…”

    …This is funny, because it actually comes from a pushy human.

    Takes one to know one, eh Mikey?

    No wonder you hate pushy humans, because you’re one yourself.

  • Mike Abundo says: Mike Abundo

    Why, thank you, Sparky. :)

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