Yahoo

It has been pretty obvious that Google has dominated its competitors consistently. Nevertheless, rival Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz has pointed out a certain weakness that might cause Google to worry.

According to Bartz, “Google is going to have a problem because Google is only known for search. It is only half our business; it’s 99.9% of their business. They’ve got to find other things to do. Google has to grow a company the size of Yahoo every year to be interesting.”

While Google has a market cap of around $169 billion, Yahoo has a market cap of around $24 billion. However, Bartz’s comments do put pressure on the search engine giant to excel in something that is not related to online search!

According to comScore, global search market increased by 46% in the last year alone with U.S. remaining the largest search market worldwide.

There were more than 131 billion searches done from different places and by different age ranges. This would mean 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour and 29 million per minute. Google sites still rule and dominate the market and had a 58% increase in searches followed distantly by Yahoo! with 13% growth. Read the full story

A man who was mentioned to have “dramatically improved dallasnews.com” would now be the lead editor for Yahoo local news. Looks like Yahoo does believe that quality and creativity of the news that it provides its visitors is a crucial factor in traffic growth. Read the full story

It is infact possible to send mails from any email address using your Gmail. Isn’t that cool? You can use Gmail and send an Yahoo or any other email address mail. Please follow the steps below to set up send and receive from another email address. Read the full story

comScore, Inc. , a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. In September 2009, Americans conducted 13.8 billion core searches, with Google Sites accounting for 64.9 percent search market share. Microsoft Sites grabbed 9.4 percent market share, representing a slight gain versus August.

September 2009 U.S. Core Search Rankings

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in September with 64.9 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (18.8 percent), and Microsoft Sites (9.4 percent). Ask Network captured 3.9 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 3.0 percent. Read the full story

Barack Obama’s historical presedential win got him the most number of searches and clicks on Yahoo this year. However, “Britney Soears,” tops the list reported Yahoo Inc. The second most searched term was “World Wrestling Entertainment” followed by Obama. Read the full story

Remember the Billionaire Carl Icahn? The limelight he tried to capture with Microsoft support? Guys, his game is not yet over! Icahn has opposed to sell part of Yahoo to former AOL Chief Executive Jonathan Miller. How will he as he is been fed by Microsoft? Read the full story

Yahoo! Announced last night that its chief executive officer and co-founder will step down. Jerry Yang, now 40 co-founded Yahoo along with David Filo during 1994. He had returned as the chief last year.

Yahoo has been struggling to stay alive during the recent years after Google attracted all of Yahoo’s loyal followers towards it. Yahoo, once holded dominion over the internet and during 2000 its shares peaked above $400. However, Yahoo slowly started to die after Google was launched and with Googles frequent innovative and creative products, Yahoo was just not able to meet the competition or keep the phase.

Yahoo also has plans to further reduce its workforce by 10 percent which would be 15,000 of its employees. It should also be noted that Yahoo had previously laid off 1000 employees in January this year.

Jerry Yang mentioned that “from founding this company to guiding its growth into a trusted global brand that is [indispensable] to millions of people, I have always sought to do what is best for our franchise.” He further added, “When the Board asked me to become CEO and lead the transformation of the Company, I did so because it was important to re-envision the business for a different era to drive more effective growth. Having set Yahoo! on a new, more open path, the time is right for me to transition the CEO role and our global talent to a new leader.”

Jerry Yang had replaced Terry S. Semel in June, 2007 stating that he would turn the companies future around as the company struggled to bring in revenues. However, Yang couldn’t live up to his promises. Yang was put to severe controversy when he was not ready to sell Yahoo to Microsoft for $33 million. Shareholders accused him stating he was too loyal to his company and dint have the heart to see it being sold to its rivalry.

Cisco is strengthening its plan to enter into the internet industry with the purchase of the messaging platform, Jabber. Cisco has already purchased WebEx, Securent, PostPath and IronPort. The Jabber acquisition will help Cisco enhance its services across multiple platforms by providing on-premise and on-demand solutions. Doug Dennerline, Cisco senior vice-president of the Collaboration Software Group stated “Enterprise organizations want an extensible presence and messaging platform that can integrate with business process applications and easily adapt to their changing needs.” He also stated that the acquisition will help extend the instant messaging service and make Cisco a interoperability benchmark.Jabber is a popular messaging platform and it is compatible with different systems and platforms. MS Office Com Server, AOL AIM, Google, Yahoo! And IBM Sametime can be used with Jabber. Employees of Jabber would become part of the Collaboration Software Group which consists of Ciscos most profitable businesses like the IOS network operating system, Unified Communications solutions, SaaS offering, policy management and network and service management.

The drama never seems to get over. After Carl Icahn’s stunt as a middle man between Microsoft and Yahoo, now Eric Jackson has formed the ‘Yahoo! Plan B’ investor community. Who doesn’t want to be in the limelight?

Eric Jackson, who is the founder of a hedge fund company and also an activist investor, has launched a Yahoo! Shareholder community to help share holders discuss and exchange ideas.

With the Yahoo! Annual Meeting slated to start on August 1st, it would be interesting to see the drama on stage.

• Would the Plan B or Carl Icahn win their deal?
• Would there be a full acquisition by Microsoft?
• Would Microsoft buy search alone?
• Would there ever be a deal?
• Would the board of members still be able to hold on to their seats?

Industry analysts also have brought in the question that how do shareholders think that they would still get sizable profit selling to Microsoft. What if Microsoft plays the game after the ball is in its court? Even Microsoft is not performing well with their internet applications. It’s far too worse compared to Yahoo. How do they think that Microsoft can handle Yahoo well and overtake Google?

Though there are a number of shareholders like Jackson and Icahn along industry experts offering their suggestions, there still seems to be no light in the tunnel.