ENS Marketing

Things we would like to see, aka dumb idea no.1 - yaskMicrohoo

This will never happen but:
Wouldn’t it be nice if the brightest brains at Yahoo! Search, Microsoft Live and whomever is left of Ask.com (who would be asked to leave voluntarily because nobody wants to muck about with big Barry-D anymore), merged to form a somewhat separate company?

It would be the greatest gift to the collective intellect if some sort of magic freed those incredible minds from the tyranny of the stupidity they toil under today. For what it’s worth (and that could be a great deal), Yahoo! and Microsoft could share ownership of the entity. They could entertain each other’s management trees with graphics and pie charts and innumerable high-power meetings; whatever… As long as they refrain from interfering with people who are clearly smarter than they are, the new joint entity can probably run itself.

As things stand today, something has to break.

There is no way Yahoo! is ever going to challenge Google for search market share. Nothing short of the Pope exposing Sergey or Larry (or both) as the Anti-Christ on steroids is going to change that. Last month, YouTube scored almost as many search queries as Yahoo!. They’re almost not even #2 anymore.

Google is winning on all counts and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. That’s not supposed to happen but it is. It’s not that I dislike Google. I deeply admire them. Google so fully understands search it now defines what search means. (Ask actually abdicated that responsibility because nobody appreciated what they were accomplishing, but I digress…)

As much as I admire the set of tools Google has built, I believe there is a desperate need for a number of information sources in an intellectually rich and stable society. As I used to value the experience of several different librarians, I now value the variety of search engine options available to anyone who wants to access them. The thing is, most people go to Google first and fewer are turning to Yahoo! or Live.

The folks working at Yahoo! KNOW how to do search. Unfortunately, their pointy-headed corporation misjudged the tone of search and remade a constantly confusing mishmash of an INDEX page, year after year after long-suffering year.

To make matters even sadder, Yahoo! owes the original pay-per-click search engine, Overture! (insert exasperated sigh here…) Seriously!!! I couldn’t possibly make this stuff up, it really happened! Management managed to throttle the golden goose that produced PPC while Google built a genetically modified and totally superior clone. Note who’s eating the lion’s share of golden eggs. Modern alchemy makes for an interesting history.

Similarly, that great geek-squad in Seattle has many of the most talented people in the known universe working on search. Seriously, they do… I’ve seen them with my own two eyes and can attest to their actual existence in reality. Unfortunately, their corporation totally and fully missed the boat on how the free Internet works. They thought they could control user experience from the desktop and everyone innovated around them.

By the time Microsoft finally did catch on, Google was well on its way to its seemingly insurmountable lead in all things search. In most cases, Microsoft is assumed to have the muscle to move mountains but that takes a long time and can get kinda messy.

Attempting to buy Yahoo! and totally upsetting the delicate balance of last year’s business battlefield was really, really messy. In hindsight, it was a series of stupid mistakes. There are better ways to move a mountain than brute force.

Nobody wants to hurt Google but everybody with half the brains of the Googlite sporting the lowest GPA wants to see a competitive search marketplace. Google itself values the appearance of a competitive marketplace though it also enjoys making almost all of the money.

Neither Microsoft or Yahoo! pose any sort of challenge to Google on their own and both corporations are too arrogant and stupid to come to a realistic arrangement. That leaves only one option, we’ll call it yaskMicrohoo or, “Fantasy” for short.

Microsoft should immediately set about doing two things. First, it should establish a separate corporation, stock it with the very best search talent they have and immediately claim 50% ownership. It should then offer cash and the other half-stake in the new entity to Yahoo! and its beleaguered shareholders in exchange for their search divisions. If that happens, I can virtually guarantee every talented person from Ask and many who Ask foolishly forsake would come looking to add their skills in a heartbeat. This, of course, is never going to happen.
Until something shifts (and it very well may in a few short weeks), all we have is fantasy. I kinda like this one.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 5th, 2008 at 9:41 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimization, Traffic Generation, Website Traffic, seo, social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.