I disagree. If I go to Yahoo or Google it's to search the internet for something. I don't want/need any of that other information from their portal, just a search box. If I wanted news or something I'd go to the CBC site or CNN or something.
There is no doubt that google is better for search, I do not use yahoo for search.
But yahoo has so much more than search, yahoo messenger, yahoo chat rooms, groups, yahoo email, etc etc. At one point, before the likes of facebook and myspace came along, for the social aspect, I would have said yahoo was the undeniable king, but a series of bad decisions, together with an inability to move with the times, has seen them lose some of their glory.
Not to mention their partnerships, here in Australia, yahoo has a strategic partnership with our number one television station, channel 7.
Go to Alexa and the number one site in terms of traffic is not Google, it is Yahoo. Not to mention that yahoo own a large number of other sites, for instance flickr, which is to photos what youtube is for video.
That being said, I think that microsoft is possibly making the wrong move, I don't really trust the judgement of Steve Ballmer, like I would Bill Gates.
Microsoft if it got together some of the brightest minds, and best programmers could in my opinion build a better search product than google.
But instead microsoft were stupid, they went down the road of trying to market a product that wasnt worthy of being used. microsoft live search is total crap. For one, I dont think they have the technological infrastructure to build a better search product. They need enough raw server power to index all of the web pages out there on the internet and deliver search results fast enough. This site as an example has google and yahoo bots visiting all the time, msn is rarely seen and has very few pages indexed. Then comes the secret sauce formula of building a better search algorithm. Microsoft could blow google away so easily, they have the cash, and the intelligence to do it, just look at what they have done with the xbox 360, and how it has come from virtually nowhere to a position of holding a large share of the computer game market.
As good a site as yahoo is, the real cash and what they really want to get a share of is the search and ad market. I just think they are eating up their cash reserves and would find themselves left with an asset that is hard to integrate and is in itself not any serious competition to google anyway.
Hotmail has always been a travesty of it's own there!
