The Yahoo Rumor

Yahoo has now come out and said what we all thought: the rumor that it had given up on trying to best Google in search is not true. Okay great, but what if it was true, couldn’t that help Yahoo? Whether or not they are trying to beat Google in search (or are beating Google in quality of search), one thing that is clear is that Yahoo does not like the compassion. I’m not sure where the quote is so I won’t try to find it, but Terry Semel (Y! Ceo) recently talked about how he disliked the comparison of Google to other portals, because Google only wanted to talk search and claim it was number one when in reality it is now a portal making it number three (Brin’s comeback was to say that the Googleplex Cafe is not a top tier restaurant, and no one cares about that either - implying rankings are meaningless, if you’re familiar with Lopico you can understand why I might not like this comment). So, what if Yahoo no longer cared about presenting itself as a search company and instead focused on all of its other services? Then how would a comparison between Yahoo and Google go? Probably more along the lines of: Yahoo has a ton of killer services and Google competes with one or two of them, but really isn’t a major player yet. For now however, the world is hooked on minimalist search, even when we know it doesn’t work all that well for some things - such as a Video Store.
The point is this, take away search from Yahoo and you still have a great company, take away search from Google and you have a company that has a great email app, a pretty good rss reader, and a huge ad network with few places to place the ads. If Yahoo were to deemphasize its search you would see a company with a lot of great offerings and comparisons to Google would be almost meaningless - something that Yahoo would surely like.

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