Yahoo Chief: ‘We Have Never Been a Search Company’

The dust has settled – for the moment – on the Microsoft and Yahoo search and advertising deal. So, perhaps there’s room for a bit of reflection.

Last week, Brad Stone and I interviewed Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s chief executive, and she -– along with an animated security guard -– provided some insights into the company’s culture that have been arguably under-reported by the press.

For one, Yahoo views search in a different manner than Google and Microsoft. The Bing and Google boys want to have standalone search franchises that function as helpers for our brains. If you’re out hunting for something specific, you hit Google or Bing in the hopes of finding an answer.

Ms. Bartz places Yahoo’s position in a rather different light. “We have never been a search company,” she said. “It is, ‘I am on Yahoo. I am going to do a search.’”

It’s a subtle verbal difference but perhaps an obvious practical one to Internet users. Yahoo, according to Ms. Bartz, simply feeds search results for people who have grown curious while reading one of its news stories or watching a video. It doesn’t generally pop into peoples’ minds as the first place to go look for answers during the course of their day-to-day activities.

As such, Ms. Bartz said she could continue to live with the 20 percent or so share of the search market Yahoo has today. “I am a very viable number,” she said. “It is very profitable, and we would be happy all day long.”

The biggest thing for Yahoo is increasing the number of pages people consume and slapping as many display ads as possible across those pages. “My fortunes are tied to my pages,” Ms. Bartz said.

When it comes to those pages, Yahoo seems to be in a state of confusion. Its Sports section, for example, has reporters producing top-notch original material ranging from scoopy news items and blogs to long-form analysis pieces. The other parts of Yahoo tend to rely far more heavily on stories and other content from outside organizations.

According to Ms. Bartz, the majority of Yahoo’s sites will go the way of Sports. In particular, Yahoo will throw investments behind its entertainment, finance and news operations. Ms. Bartz noted that there are plenty of unemployed journalists out there to pick up.

Original source and the rest of the article – NY Times

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