Yahoo & BT - Have They Sold Out?

I have been a BT Yahoo broadband customer for a number of years. I always liked the level of service, no down time, easy to use web mail, excellent help functionality, what more could you want from your ISP?

However, over recent weeks I have become a little disallusioned with both Yahoo and BT. I have noticed that the Yahoo home page now has adverts sprinkled all over it, in much a similar way to a previous email company I used, i.e. Lycos. Lycos (well the free version at least) is virtually unusable, there are so many adverts in and around it and it appears that Yahoo is slowly sliding into the same trap. I don't know how many customers Lycos lost through their agressive advert marketing campaign but I hazard a guess at millions.

Just this week my web based email client provided by BT Yahoo suddenly started throwing up adverts and interrupting my quest to delete the 200 or so spam emails I get every single day. So not only are their spam filters poor but now they are trying to persuade me to click on adverts in what I always considered to be the private sanctuary of my personal inbox. I suppose this could be construed as spam advertising, although this would never stand up in an arguement or court case.

Being UK based, for me, Yahoo was always the search engine of choice. It was the first search engine to offer the kind of service we have become accustomed to, however, in recent years Google has taken that mantle away, and I can only guess that Yahoo's profits are being hit quite hard as they lose more and more of the market to Google. This is probably the reason for the sudden deluge of marketing adverts appearing everywhere. Yahoo are trying to compensate for their loses by offering more adverts to each user in a bid to earn more advertising revenue.

I for one have to say I am very disappointed with this approach and can only foresee Yahoo following Lycos into the Search Engine abyss. Google is constantly offering more and more services to the user and their search results are used by virtually every other search engine on the planet already. If Yahoo continue along this track of offering the user what it doesn't want, they will not only fall behind Google even further but Google will win the battle.

I use Google alot, I use Adwords, Adsense, Webmaster Tools, Analytics and a few Gadgets on my web sites, they know what they are doing and have never taken their eye off the ball in offering what the user requires, good quality, highly targetted search results. Yahoo appear to have forgotten this fact.

This article is damning to the extreme, I appreciate that but it is because I have used Yahoo for so many years, and they have forgotten how to serve up what I want. If I want a search engine, I want a good one that provides me with good quality results for my searches. If I pay for email, I do not want it to be full of adverts. And finally if I view a search engine home page I do not expect adverts to fill the screen when I mouseover them.

Come on Yahoo, get a grip, remember your core business, remember what your customers and users want, and stop trying to be Lycos!

Steve Sharpe is the CEO & Editor in Chief of http://www.informationbooth.net and http://www.articleland.co.uk. He has been in internet marketing for a number of years and can be reached for further information at his websites.