Yahoo’s search results may now be accompanied by a "Powered by Bing" tagline, but the company remains adamant that it hasn’t exited the search race. Shashi Seth, SVP of Yahoo Search Products, protested the idea in a recent blog post.
The title of the post was "Yahoo! Search will always be a Search Engine," and Seth started out with a weak analogy involving planes. He wrote, "Take a look at Boeing or Airbus aircrafts. They outsource their engines to Rolls Royce, United Technologies, and GE. But, does that mean that Boeing and Airbus are no longer airline manufacturers?"
It’s all too easy to answer that most people can recognize the difference between an engine and an entire plane, and that any in-depth discussion of a plane is sure to involve a separate mention of the engine’s maker.
Still, Seth went on to provide some important facts. "Yahoo! Search supplements Microsoft’s web Index with Yahoo!’s own content, content from third party relationships, and content from social networks like Twitter," he stated. "We still maintain the technology, science, scale and infrastructure required to crawl, index and rank this data – and all in real-time (less than a second)."
Seth hinted that fresh advances are on the way, as well.
And wherever you fall on this issue, it’s important to note that Yahoo’s shareholders seem to have accepted Seth’s arguments. Yahoo’s stock is up 0.72 percent at the moment, even as Google, Microsoft, the Dow, and the Nasdaq are all down.