Yahoo // Article 4 // Google Lists Yahoo & Microsoft as main competitor

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2004/apr/29/googlelistsmi

Google's SEC filing includes the following two paragraphs:

We face significant competition from Microsoft and Yahoo

We face formidable competition in every aspect of our business, and particularly from other companies that seek to connect people with information on the web and provide them with relevant advertising. Currently, we consider our primary competitors to be Microsoft and Yahoo. Microsoft has announced plans to develop a new web search technology that may make web search a more integrated part of the Windows operating system. We expect that Microsoft will increasingly use its financial and engineering resources to compete with us. Yahoo has become an increasingly significant competitor, having acquired Overture Services, which offers Internet advertising solutions that compete with our AdWords and AdSense programs, as well as the Inktomi, AltaVista and AllTheWeb search engines. Since June 2000, Yahoo has used, to varying degrees, our web search technology on its web site to provide web search services to its users. We have notified Yahoo of our election to terminate our agreement, effective July 2004. This agreement with Yahoo accounted for less than 3% of our net revenues for the year ended December 31, 2003 and less than 3% for the three months ended March 31, 2004.

Both Microsoft and Yahoo have more employees than we do (in Microsoft's case, currently more than 20 times as many). Microsoft also has significantly more cash resources than we do. Both of these companies also have longer operating histories and more established relationships with customers. They can use their experience and resources against us in a variety of competitive ways, including by making acquisitions, investing more aggressively in research and development and competing more aggressively for advertisers and web sites. Microsoft and Yahoo also may have a greater ability to attract and retain users than we do because they operate Internet portals with a broad range of products and services. If Microsoft or Yahoo are successful in providing similar or better web search results compared to ours or leverage their platforms to make their web search services easier to access than ours, we could experience a significant decline in user traffic. Any such decline in traffic could negatively affect our net revenues.

Comment: sounds pretty much like my Online cover story Google fights for top spot from October 30. This was the piece where Jim Pitkow of Moreover told me: "The only thing that Google really lacks is email." "Does that mean we can expect Page and Brin to launch an email service?", I asked. "It's a pretty good bet that they will," he replied, "because of the advertising potential. An email service is a great place to post ads: that's why email is still free."

Yahoo // Article 3

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has admitted that Facebook could one day become Yahoo's number one competitor, according to USA Today. When asked what company was Yahoo's single biggest competitor, Bartz replied: "Facebook — not today, but they could be. If they keep going, they will have the vault of information on everybody in the world, and that’s valuable." When asked whether Facebook was valuable to the point of scary, she said: "Yes, creepy. I don't care to find an old boyfriend. One time, just to see if they got fat and bald, but then leave me alone. But I'm old."

The comments are from the USA Today CEO Forum in Atlanta, which happened over a week ago, but they were only published today on the newspaper's website. The Q&A was "edited for length and clarity," so unfortunately we don't know if there was any relevant context to the questions.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was recently asked a similar question, but he said that neither Facebook nor Apple were Google's biggest competition. Instead, he said it was Bing. Of course, Yahoo is now powered by Bing so of course Microsoft is more friend than foe. Still, it's interesting to see that Google completely denies Facebook being a competitor while Yahoo says that it will be one day.

Yahoo // Article 2

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Microsoft-Yahoo-Still-Search-Competitors-According-to-Yahoo-706078

Microsoft and Yahoo may have signed a 10-year agreement that has Bing powering search on Yahoo sites, but Yahoo still insists that its online partner remains a competitor in the U.S. search arena. As Yahoo rolled out several new features for its key products on Aug. 24, its executives suggested the company's focus is now on their Web sites' front-end experience, even with Bing taking over search-engine duties.

Despite a 10-year agreement that has Microsoft's Bing powering search on Yahoo's sites, Yahoo evidently still sees its online partner as a competitor. In an Aug. 24 press conference, Yahoo executives revealed several new upgrades to its key products, while also suggesting that Yahoo will continue to duel heartily against both Microsoft and Google to pull eyeballs to its sites.    

"The agreement calls for Microsoft to supply us with algorithmic search results, images and video," Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president of Yahoo's Labs and Search Strategy, said during the press conference. "We will be free to innovate on top of that layer." 

Raghavan suggested that Yahoo will no longer fight what he termed "the megawatt war," with search engines chewing through billions of Web pages in order to spit results back to the end-user, and will instead focus on providing a front-end experience different from that offered by either Microsoft or Google. 

To that end, Yahoo plans on integrating several new features into its user experience, including upgrades to Yahoo Search, Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail. The evident hope is that those front-end applications will compel users to choose Yahoo over Bing or Google, whose homepages emphasize search over applications such as email.   

Besides a new three-column layout that mirrors the Yahoo homepage, Yahoo's new search page integrates results from YouTube, Yelp and other sites; searching for people will pull results from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed and other social-networking sites. Despite the Microsoft deal, Yahoo signaled during the press conference that it fully intends to continue devoting resources to its front-end search experience. 

Yahoo's insistence that it remains competitive comes after weeks of speculation that the Microsoft agreement would mean the end of Yahoo as a viable search competitor. Analysts have also suggested that, despite the combined scale of Microsoft-Yahoo search, the companies could still have a hard time presenting a viable threat to Google's market share.

Under the terms of the agreement, officially inked on July 29, Microsoft Bing will power Yahoo's search engine while Yahoo takes on worldwide sales duties for both companies' search advertisers. The deal was widely seen as an attempt by both companies to counter the rising dominance of Google, which holds a 65 percent share of the U.S. search-engine market. 

Combined, Bing and Yahoo will hold close to 30 percent of that market. Microsoft has suggested that, by incorporating Yahoo's user base, Bing will now be able to utilize more user-generated data in refining search results. One key part of the deal had Yahoo "owning" the user experience on its sites, including search - an aspect the company has seized upon to suggest that it remains competitive. 

Yahoo also has a potential backdoor escape from the Microsoft deal: a contract provision stating that, if Google's RPS (revenue-per-search) query rate is higher than Microsoft's and Yahoo's combined RPS rates, then Yahoo can terminate the agreement. Five years into the deal, Yahoo can terminate if Yahoo's RPS rate in the United States is less than a percentage of Google's estimated RPS on a 12-month average. Microsoft will also pay $150 million to Yahoo over the first three years of the agreement, and hire over 400 Yahoo employees.

Facebook's Website

Facebook is another of Yahoos main competitors and it is much more popular, especially with the target audience of the brief. Facebook is a social networking site that incorporates music, fan pages, followers, games, event promotion, apps, chat, it keeps everyone connected and in the know of what is going on, the gossip, and what people have been doing and who with. I want to incorporate some of the elements of Facebook into Yahoo. Facebook is addictive and there are new bits of information pictures etc uploaded every minute, the updates are contant making the users wanting to return and make it part of their daily routine.

Google's Website

Google is on of Yahoo's main competitors. I personally much prefer Google because it is cleaner, simpler and smarter and all the main icons / pages are shown clearly, and all the less important but still used icons are shown in a separate tab so the page doesn't become too cluttered.

All the icons are shown on a different page. They are set out cleanly and are a good size in comparison to Yahoo's icons. These also have a main style and use the colours of the google rather than having too many colours. 

The entertainment page / music / vidoe are layed out the clearly and have a general style so it is easy to use. It is a cleaner less complicated verson of Itunes.