What's Yahoo! doing?

• Apr. 7, 2003

If you are a regular Yahoo! user you may have noticed some changes to the site today.

With a simplified search interface, it seems obvious that Yahoo! is taking its cues from Google. But that's where the similarities seem to stop. The new Yahoo! search offers you the ability to search for web pages, news, images, directory results, and even yellow pages results.

Although they still display Google's search results as their primary results, intertwined with the Yahoo! directory matches, they have gone a few steps further. You can read more about the new Yahoo! search features here.

So, in addition to these "new" search features, what does Yahoo! have planned? When they purchased Inktomi it seemed clear that they hoped to one day replace the Google listings with their own version of crawler based results. Although this hasn't happened yet, we expect it will in the near future.

Perhaps these new search features are the first step. Perhaps they are refining their search features, to make them more user friendly, before they drop Google in favor of their own Inktomi results.

Then there's the sudden announcement that they plan to raise $750 million US but didn't divulge what they plan to buy. Speculation is that they would like to buy Overture. After all, Overture PPC is well established around the world. By purchasing them they would gain an immediate foothold into other markets where they may not already be established.

The problem with this, though, is that Overture is worth about $846 million US currently; therefore Yahoo! wouldn't likely be able to own the company outright. Even if the majority of shareholders agreed to the purchase, you can almost bet that stakeholders such as directors won't give up that easily.  The only other alternative (short of building their own PPC engine) would be to buy Looksmart, but it's only worth abour $282 million US.

And what about Overture’s recent purchases of Altavista and Allthebweb? If Yahoo! bought Overture, then they'll own the rights to three different, yet equally viable spiders. I suppose they could sell a couple to other sites (I hear MSN is looking to develop its own search).

If that was the case, where Yahoo! bought Overture then the focus of SEO would change. Yahoo! directory results would become relevant again, and they would become the next force to compete with Google.  Google would have a tougher time competing because Yahoo! is already so well established.  And since Yahoo! already offers more than Google, they could entice users to switch to an all encompassing service.

Again, we will have to wait and see what happens.

Rob Sullivan
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning
specialists