I was alerted by Thomas Hawk about the latest “news” building up in the blogosphere, and as such the top news on Memeorandum: Yahoo! gives up quest for search dominance. My initial reaction was that this must be one of these quotes being taken out of a specific context, and the sensational aspect of the headline is leading everyone to pile in. To cut the commentary short: Bullshit. No way.
Google has by far the largest market share in the search market – in the US and Europe, and it will be difficult for Yahoo to catch up on pure algorithmic search. Asia is a completely different matter, and is fair game to both players – just listen to the end of Om and Niall’s most recent Podsessions on that very topic. It is also worth remembering that we are just at the beginning of the search game: alternate search mechanism are being developed (as we discussed during our last session of the Search SIG), complex searches don’t work (try a search on “fridge” “same day delivery” as I did after our fridge melted on Sunday – I ended up calling retailers in the area b/c search results were so off base), etc. There is so much to be done…
I am not defending Yahoo here (they are big enough to do it themselves 
, or downplaying Google (my default search engine), but merely wishing that we bloggers think about the implications and/or the likelihood of what is being reported before adding noise to the signal. Too much trigger happiness and not enough analysis in my opinion. Dave Taylor is apparently in the same boat: No, bloggers, Yahoo isn’t “conceding search to Google”.
More later. Got to run to a meeting – with MSN Search.