5 Things Yahoo! Does Better Than Google (and Everyone Else)

To help with this post I brought in a guest blogger, my good friend Greg Gibson, whose Elf Needs Food blog covers videogames, the gaming industry, and movie and book reviews. He's also on Twitter: @ElfNeedsFood.

1. Yahoo! News
I was excited when Google introduced Google News. It made sense to me at the time: Google's engineers are so smart that they can program algorithms that find interesting news much better than people can, right?!? Wrong. When I want a firehose of information, I go to popurls.com. When I want the news of the day, in the way I once might have read a daily newspaper, I go to Yahoo! News. Google News is only good for their keyword alerts. CNN.com gives me a headache.

2. YUI
The YUI library is an extensive collection of JavaScript and CSS tools. Basically, YUI provides everything a front-end web developer/designer needs, short of HTML and content.  Because Yahoo! uses YUI for its own applications, the code has already been tested at one of the most visited sites on the web, it has to work in all major browsers, and it's likely to be supported and updated for a long time to come.

There's no other library that provides a combined JavaScript and CSS solution of YUI's caliber, but even separately, I'd probably use its tools in my web projects. YUI's CSS framework is the best I've tried (Blueprint is pretty nice, too). As for JavaScript libraries, picking one is often a matter of preference. For example, plenty of people love jQuery, which has a great community that creates plugins to extend the library. I prefer YUI, because it has so much included functionality and it mixes in seamlessly with the other JavaScript I write.

Finally, the genius of YUI isn't just the library itself. Yahoo! has stocked the developers' area of their site with excellent videos, examples, and documentation, making it easy to get started with the library -- and providing a path to becoming an expert.

3. Yahoo! Finance
I once had a client who was interested in advertising on Yahoo! Finance. No problem, I thought. I'll just find the advertising contact info on their site, call them up, and I'm sure they'll be glad to take your money. After repeated phone calls and voicemails and emails, I got nowhere. I finally had to call in a favor from an ad agency to get someone's direct line at Yahoo!, only to learn that they have separate departments for handling agency inquiries and direct purchases. I also learned that the minimum ad buy is $25,000—not a huge sum in the advertising world but quite different from Google's $0.01 minimum.

So why is it so hard to advertise on Yahoo! Finance? Because it's been a great site since it launched and they've never relinquished their lead. More importantly, it's where financial advisors and other sophisticated investors go—along with the masses. When you ask investment professionals what sites they visit, the top three are usually CNN, ESPN and Yahoo! Finance. Yahoo! knows they've got a good thing with Finance. They should still pick up the phone, though.

4. Yahoo! TV Listings
    Yahoo! Movie Showtimes
These no-frills utilities are the best at what they do precisely because they're no-frills. When looking up movie times and TV show listings, I just want the information displayed cleanly and quickly. Yahoo!'s TV and movie listings meet those two qualifications better than any other site on the web. (Recently, though, I've found myself using iPhone apps for both these tasks.)

5. Yahoo! Sports
From a sports site, I usually want two things: analysis and in-game box scores (which I usually prefer to animated gamecasts).

ESPN is the king of reporting on trade rumors, team politics, and sports-related social issues. These are easy things to write about, because they require little expertise, just access. But the network seems to have very few analysts who really understand -- or even seem to watch -- the sports they cover.

About a dozen full-time basketball writers work for ESPN, only two of whom (John Hollinger and Henry Abbott) are credible hoops junkies. Yahoo's "Ball Don't Lie" blog -- which is just one part of their basketball coverage -- has just as many. And one of those contributors, Kelly Dwyer, is the single best basketball analyst at any mainstream site. He's a fan, he understands the game, and he can write.

From a box score, I just want something up-to-date, quick-loading, and easy on the browser. Yahoo!'s and ESPN's box score formats are pretty similar, but Yahoo! does a better job of organizing data for a quick snapshot of the game in progress. Without scrolling my browser down, a Yahoo! baseball box score features the inning-by-inning score, the team lineups, and a display showing many runners are on base, who's pitching, who's up to bat, the current balls-and-strikes count, and what happened on the last pitch. ESPN's box scores show only the inning-by-inning scoring.

(As a recent convert to English Premier League soccer, Yahoo!'s Eurosport Football site is also the best gameday resource I've found, at least so far.)

Honorable Mention: Yahoo! Mail
Yahoo! Mail was once the clear winner over its competitors—Hotmail and AOL—and then Gmail came along and squashed them like a bug. I dutifully got a Gmail invite (from Greg, now that I think about it) but never made the switch, not completely anyway. The threaded conversations in Gmail are great once you get the hang of them but sometimes there is comfort in the familiar way of doing things, even if Google engineers think it's silly. And since Yahoo!'s acquisition of Oddpost in 2004 allowed them to introduce AJAX functionality, they have had a pretty damn good email client. Gmail is probably better, but to me it's a marginal difference and not enough to make me force my friends and family to update their address books.

Honorable Mention: Yahoo! Personals
I haven't used this site in about eight years, but it did allow my eventual wife to discover me. I can't complain about a 100% success rate.