Ms. Bartz specifically stated that, “We have never been a search company,” and again, “It is, ‘I am on Yahoo. I am going to do a search.”
There is now a lot being said on the web saying that Ms. Bartz is simple making excuses for Yahoo and trying to find a way to explain why they haven’t been able to compete with Google.
I just want to add that I agree with Ms. Bartz – Yahoo has never been about competing in search and specifically competing against Google.
Everyone I know has there homepage set to Yahoo.com. What homepage is your browser set to? And the reason so many people set their homepage to Yahoo is for the news and content across many different topics.
The secret to Yahoo’s success is not in trying to be like Google. In fact anyone who tries to do it will fail – including Microsoft – with the exception of Twitter. Twitter might be able to compete with Google in search (but I digress…)
Yahoo is smart, I think, in establishing themselves as a news and content site. Because in all honesty, that’s how I, and everyone I know, naturally uses Yahoo.
So the secret to Yahoo’s success is to capitalize on their strength of delivering great news and information, and establishing themselves as the “go to” site for content.
And in my opinion – they’ve already achieved this goal.