Google vs. Yahoo.

So this morning I started my daily routine. I woke up. Brushed my teeth. Then got online for 30 minutes. First I went to fantasysports.yahoo.com. Then I checked mail.yahoo.com. Altogether I spent 20 minutes on these two yahoo sites. But I did not click on one ad. In fact I have never clicked on a yahoo ad.

Then I looked up a few things on google. Spent just a few seconds on google suggest. Thats all it took. Google returns relevant search results. Yahoo returns results based on who pays them the most to be ranked higher. So I use google for search. But I have found myself clicking on google ads. It is laid out very very simply. In fact google.com is the most simple website I have ever seen. There are only a dozen or so words on the whole page. Your grandma could search using it.

So whats the point to this blog? Yahoo and Google are not nearly in the competition that armchair investors perceive. In fact they will diverse more and more as time goes on.

Yahoo is a social network. They can make their money off of social subscriptions, not search. They have yahoo personals, yahoo fantasy sports, yahoo mail, geocities, etc. Yahoo has content. They are the knowledge source, if you will.

Google is a relationship manager. They make their money off of discovering relations and returning the most meaningful results. (I can talk about google all day, but I won't...I Love google [note: I do not love google stock!]) Google is intelligence. Google learns, which makes their results more relevant, which allows their ads to conform to your search or furthermore you.

(note: google owns this blog. If you want to ever search for something you know you read before in this blog, type in a keyword in the search box in the top left...it impresses me how relevant it is).

Yahoo plans to be your destination. Google plans to be the path to get you to destinations. Explain to me why everything thinks they are such competitors when they have such different goals, and paths to reach these goals.