Search Engine Optimization

Though Yahoo is considered #2 search engine after Google, their business model and philosophies are very different. Yahoo outscored search to Google until 2004 before discovering how profitable search advertising was. They then acquired Inktomi and Overture to build their own search and advertising platform.

Yahoo was never focused on search, like Google, and entered search game due to revenue potential. Yahoo still remains a destination and a content provider in verticals like real estate, movies, music, personals, shopping, travel, etc. At the core, Yahoo is focused on monetizing it own, and affiliated content, while Google is focused on monetizing content of others, without any proprietary content of its own.

• Yahoo is focused part of the internet audience, while Google is focused on serving entire internet audience. This reflects in Google’s availability on over 100 languages while Yahoo is limited to ~30.
• Google partners and works with most of Yahoo’s major content competitors.
• Yahoo has a mixed business model – advertising and subscriptions. Google is purely an ad platform.
• Yahoo is monetizing their own content and third parties, while Google has mastered how to monetize content of others.

Yahoo’s Panama platform which promised to be a defying counterpart to Google Adwords has not delivered the promises due to Yahoo’s smaller market share in search. The competitiveness of an ad platform relies on the market reach it delivers to advertisers, not on technology (second priority). With Yahoo’s 20% it could not possibly deliver similar effects as the Adwords.

Why Microsoft is Weak Competitor to Google.