After years of on and off romances, Yahoo has finally married of it’s search daughter to Microsoft. What remains is for Yahoo to select a new direction, probably in pursuit of the title “Internet Content King.”

Once upon a time, when the internet was young and Yahoo was geeky, the company wanted to provide a portal for internet users to start their day and to shape their experience. They didn’t really want to get involved in search because they didn’t want to spend all that money on infrastructure. So they tried to lay search off on Alta Vista, in an effort to keep competition in the Valley healthy, to provide competition for Google. When that didn’t work, the took search back in-house.

In some ways, selling off search to Microsoft gets Yahoo back to its roots: provision of content. CEO Carol Bartz has made the following statements recently:

We’re not a search company.

It’s where people find relevant and contextual information. It’s news, it’s sports…home page, mail. It’s a fabulous place.

What Bartz was describing, of course, was a content company, according to a CNET story. In order to stay relevant and healthy, a post-search Yahoo may need to become the leading light in internet content. Although it is readily apparent that no one will ever control all the content on the intentionally widely distributed Web and Google has illustrated well that search and content do not play all that nicely together, Yahoo has proven that it is a savvy aggregator of things like news, and even that it can lead in some content areas, like entertainment.

Now it remains for Bartz and the others at Yahoo to wrap their heads completely around the content concept, to develop a plan, and to execute it. At this point, that may be a large order but it is not one that they cannot deliver upon. Yahoo has always been in the content business, but has sublimated Content to Search. Free of the implication sof that sublimation, they can now commit themselves to a new direction, and content is the obvious choice.

Yahoo will have a significant revenue stream, with 88 percent of Microsoft search revenue coming its way. It may well be that content is less expensive than search. They can continue their movement into content integration by simply widening their scope. They could begin to provide a lot more original content with a change in human resources direction. All of that is possible, but Bartz will need both luck and talent to get the transition done both quickly and well.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 at 1:34 pm under Google, Internet, Microsoft, Yahoo!.

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
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