Yahoo! Gives Up Search Race: Admits Defeat to Google

Brett Tabke at WebmasterWorld posted a thread named Yahoo Captitulates - Gives Up Goal of Being #1 in Search quoting an article from Seattle Pi.

"We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google," Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."

Wow! So what are the forum folks saying about this?

they don`t want to set expectations to high, that way they can`t fail! it is a win-win situation.

Yahoo going for the underdog approach?

I'm sure the shareholders will just eat that one up.

Then they need to ditch their search engine, or sell it, and concentrate on being a portal and/or something else.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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posted rustybrick in Yahoo! News at January 24, 2006 9:02 AM Comments (7)

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I wanted to give props to Greg Boser for his nostradamus impression re: this statement from his blog post 1/12: http://yahoo.webguerrilla.com/yahoo-number-2/

Posted by Chris B at January 24, 2006 10:16

ditching their search engine would be bad news for everyone who runs a website.

Having only one player in the market is never a good thing. If there were only Google, and Google changed their algorithm drastically (like that has never happened before) then you could lose nearly all your SE traffic. Thank god for MSN & Yahoo I say.

Posted by Chris Beasley at January 24, 2006 12:04

This is bad news. Yahoo/Overture is a huge player (first or second) in PPC. Back when they were their own corporate entity, all search engines used them.

Now Google has AdWords
And MSN will have AdCenter

So maintaining market share, and driving traffic is CRITICAL to PPC.

PPC is a very lucrative area, and unfortunately for Yahoo, probably increasingly correlated with their declining market share.

Posted by Jaimie Sirovich at January 24, 2006 12:58

This doesnt mean they wont continue to improve. It just means they do not feel they can beat Google with market share any time soon.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at January 24, 2006 13:15

If they are seen to compete havily and don't do to well it's bad, but this way they offload that burden early. That means that if they do well they'll come up smelling of roses. They can also dodge like for like comparisons between their services and other search engines.

Posted by Teddie at January 24, 2006 13:28

I still think it could have been stated better.

The "we will be happy to maintain our marketshare" seems to imply they expect to lose ground.

Losing ground in organic translates to a larger loss in PPC since everyone, even 2nd tier (Ask) isn't outsourcing PPC.

I'm actually a fan of Yahoo, but I still think it was a stupid thing to say.

Google is slowly diversifying into Yahoo's territory. It's no longer a one-product company. Yahoo still does more, but the future is ahead of us.

If Yahoo said "We do not expect to overtake Google near-term but we continue to improve our product and strive to eventually overtake Google" it would have been a better statement.

Nobody wants to hear "We give up."

Posted by Jaimie Sirovich at January 24, 2006 16:55

Yahoo have been plodding along successfully for years. Unlike Google they don't seem to feel the need to grab headlines every 5 minutes. They've got a business model that seems to be working quite well for them, so why try and pour money into a race they cannot win at present?

Posted by Michele at January 24, 2006 18:53

Yahoo! Gives Up Search Race: Admits Defeat to Google

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