| Search Engine Puts Profits into Yahoo’s Coffers |
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| Written by Administrator | |
| Saturday, 28 May 2005 | |
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It’s taken a vast amount of effort and commitment to bring Yahoo
from the depths of the dot com mire to where today, its challenging the
dominance of Market Leader Google. The phenomenal growth has come from
a series of strategic acquisitions - some people and some businesses. Google had been supplying Yahoo with its search facility - a situation Yahoo management hated - not only because they could have been making a better profit but it hurt ego too. The first step was a new CEO and that was Terry Semel. Next, the struggling Inktomi was bought to provide search technology - Inktomi had a product which had plenty of scope for development. In January 2003, Semel brought in Tim Cadogan who’d been Vice President for at Overture Services and in the July, he paid $163 billion for Overture itself. Included in the package was the pre Google leader AltaVista and Fast, owner of the Alltheweb search engine. It was Overture who’d worked out the way to do paid searching and Yahoo made that count. With the best of data gathering bolted onto paid searches, Yahoo have a winner. Whereas at one time, Search meant Google, now, Yahoo have around 31% of the cake against Google’s 36%. It had been Google’s page rank system which had impressed the Yahoo board and made them decide to ask Google to provide their search information. Page Rank positions a site according to how many hits it gets - the more hits, the higher up the page. That’s an obvious incentive to web designers to get it right and to make sure their pages are Keyword rich. The outcome is that volume keeps growing expotentionally and Profits go up with it. Currently, Yahoo has 165 million registered users - they’re getting access to 8 billion web documents. With the new services coming on line - desk-top search, audio, visual and local business - those numbers are going to look insignificant. Troy McKirk |
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| Last Updated ( Monday, 30 May 2005 ) |
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