Last week we wrote about an opening that the now-partnered Yahoo and Bing search engines have in their struggle against industry leader Google. And if that wasn’t enough to convince every Web design and marketing professional that Yahoo and Bing should be taken seriously, The New York Times has just reported on an area where Yahoo trumps Google: in financial information.
The Times reports mentions a comScore study that found Yahoo Finance soundly beat Google Finance for 19 months in a row. Yahoo Finance pulls in 17.5 times the traffic as its Google counterpart. The report stated that in July, Yahoo’s business and finance page drew 21.9 million unique visitors from the United States; Google’s business and finance page only drew 1.2 million.
Yahoo’s success in this category can be seen as a great lesson in Web design and marketing. Yahoo audience group vice president James Pitaro says that Yahoo’s success can be attributed to Yahoo’s understanding of what users want to see when then visit a finance page. In the Times article, he mentions that their research found that users grew more anxious when they were bombarded with too much information. That’s why Yahoo developed a Web design and marketing strategy akin to the Apple model: they developed a clean and simple front page look. Google Finance Web design and marketing strategy, on the other hand, offers an array of numbers and charts—with the option for the user to add more charts if she so wishes. Here’s how the Times story puts it:
Yahoo understands that a free finance site prospers by drawing less from the world of mathematics and more from the world of entertainment, informing just enough to satisfy users without setting off an anxiety attack.
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