I stopped using Yahoo when it added hundreds of links to the front page, plus content. I would never use Yahoo for news, weather, etc. IMHO, a portal jumps the shark, as it were, when it tries to become a destination, instead of a doorway.

Key for me is to get to the information I need as quickly as possible ... given Yahoo is now using Google I go straight for search.

Why bother when a) Google is far more useful, b) Yahoo! have a degree of editorial control over the directory and don't always respond to submissions, c) advertising slows the whole thing down. Yahoo! was a flowerchild of the Internet that really lost its way in the pursuit of money. Even then, I like Google more than I ever liked Yahoo!.

The only time I ever use Yahoo is when I want to consult their web directory. The Google equivalent isn't country-specific, even though there's a Google.co.uk site. The Yahoo.co.uk directory can be used to pick out just the UK entries. If Google did this as well, I'd never go near Yahoo, for all the reasons referred to by Jack, Daniel and Chris.

Google gives me all I want within the first page 99.9% of the time.

I usually don't bother with the Yahoo directory if I feel like using a directory at all. Instead I head over to DMOZ.org.

John,

DMOZ is wonderful for many things, but also suffers from not being country-specific enough when you want it to be. An example - I'm in the middle of re-mortgaging my house, so I want a quick listing of the major lender and advice sites in the UK. In the non-country specific areas of DMOZ (and Google), I have to wade through sites from all over the world to find the ones I want. Or rather, I don't. I gave up. In the United Kingdom section of DMOZ, there are so many sites missing that should be there, I don't trust it. Yahoo UK gives me what I want, IN THIS CASE. Most of the time, Google is good enough.

I don't trust DMOZ. A section I'm interested in is, in my opinion, managed by someone who has a conflict of interest. When I tried to become another editor, or an editor of a subsection, I was rejected. The sample URLs I supplied were, however, added to the site.