Yahoo-The sleeping giant awakes?

May 29, 2023 - By Matthew Holt

While Yahoo!’s most recent notable public moment has been its CEO telling some (other) ex-pat British blogger to “Fuck Off”, this British ex-pat blogger has been waiting for a long time for Yahoo! to re-emerge in health care. And finally after a big false start in 2008, they’re baaack.

As of late this week, the new Yahoo Health is now up and running and showing a good deal of (as you’d expect) Healthline’s fingerprints (Here’s my interview with Healthline’s West Shell about them winning the contract to essentially take over the Yahoo site and more).

So pretty close to the surface are Healthline products such as Symptom Checker, Doctor Search, & Treatment Search. It’s a very good first step, and clearly a big improvement.

What’s not in this iteration is any integration with Yahoo Groups which has over 100,000 groups in its Health & Wellness category. There are over 25,000 alone about “Drugs & Medication”, 56,000 in Men’s Health, 9,300 in Reproductive Health, etc, etc. Figuring out what’s in those groups and making them much more user friendly is (I vote) the next job at Yahoo!

The giant is awake, out of bed and stumbling around the cave, but it hasn’t yet come out to frighten the villagers. Let’s hope it keeps moving!