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Yahoo! loss of search share

Nearly all of Yahoo’s revenue comes from search and display advertising. Yahoo has been losing share in search; Google’s superior algorithms boosted its share into the mid sixties. In the English lexicon, Google has become a verb “Google xyz,” meaning to perform an internet search. Yahoo is still the second most popular search engine, but I believe most Yahoo searches are secondary events.

Yahoo’s content attracts users, who in the course of their visit, become compelled to search for a particular item and do so on Yahoo, instead of navigating to Google. Conversely, users not on Yahoo’s portal choose to navigate to Google as opposed to Yahoo to perform a search query. Hence, some of Yahoo’s search traffic is a matter of circumstance, and not necessarily one’s usually first search engine choice. Therefore, the content from the portal aids in generating search traffic, but without a superior search engine, search depends heavily on traffic the portal attracts.

53% of Yahoo’s revenues come from advertising on its own properties, and segment revenues increases 18% in Q1. Yahoo attracts traffic through its news, finance, sports, and mail content/services. There isn’t anything proprietary about the content Yahoo provides, thus can be duplicated. In addition, Yahoo is buggy. Yahoo Mail doesn’t work right (search & spam filter), sometimes pages don’t render correctly and tables fail to populate. Groups and message boards are filled with spammers.

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