Part one of four in a new Yahoo! series
7 July 1999
Everybody wants to be your portal site, your start page, your all-in-one source. Words like "portal" and "channel" started having internet meanings, and it's all about driving traffic to many places via one place. Yahoo!, for some, is THE model of an internet business with partnerships up the wazoo as we say here in America :) and more subsites than I have teeth (and I have plenty of teeth). Let's break down and get to know Yahoo!'s current portal-maniacal offerings, of which many are actually useful. Yahoo! has more going on on their site than you or I probably thought, so let's break this into four episoides.
www.yahoo.com - the "online directory"
{Main source: their own data + Inktomi for "web matches"} Readers of my articles know that while I use Yahoo! as an online directory almost exclusively (it's just them and Alta Vista for me), I am becoming more and more disillusioned by it. I find that many companies and services I know are out there are not in Yahoo!... and I can't imagine it's because the companies were never submitted or don't want to be in Yahoo! If you've read my articles, you also know I am increasingly concerned about the integrity of the information presented; if some of my submissions have shown up with flat out incorrect keywords and categories, how many other listings are like that? I still demand that Yahoo! either sell their directory to someone who can really care for it OR that they get back on the ball and get more listings (and more correct listings) in there. But for now, I have not found another search engine/online directory to replace what I use Yahoo! for, so I have to give them some credit. :)
mail.yahoo.com - free web-based email
Yahoo! got on the free web-based email bus early in the game, but their system stands out. Quite different than what most sites are offering, Yahoo! allows you to not only pick up and send your Yahoo! mail, but you can also customise your reply-to email address (for those of you who'd rather use a different email address or one that matches your web address) AND you can even set it up to pick up external mail. For business or non-biz people who may be traveling and feel confident they can get to a computer on the web SOMEWHERE but don't want to bring their own equipment, Yahoo! mail is certainly an easy and free solution. Of course, it all seems to go out with the Yahoo! mail footer, which some may feel takes away from their business correspondence. I signed up for it maybe a year ago and do NOT use it. Nobody sends me mail there, that email address was never used in any newsgroups or site registrations. So I've probably received around 10 pieces of spam mail in that whole year. This tells me that unlike the AOL system, which seems to be a petri dish of junk mail no matter what you do or don't do with your account, Yahoo! must be doing something right to block most spam.
