When you are going online to search, what do you want? You want to find the best and relevant information available, right? You want as few distractions as possible. You want help to get to the good stuff, wherever it is.

This is Google’s philosophy and it has brought the company tremendous success.

Yahoo has a different approach. It is a search site, like Google, but it is also a content provider in its own right — a “portal” to use the buzz word of the 1990′s. That’s fine with us. Yahoo! has a good news service and a lot of valuable content.

But if you go to Yahoo! to search, do you do so in order to search the yahoo.com domain? Probably not. But that is the argument Yahoo! is using in a new ad. Yahoo! is, according to Yahoo!, better than Google because it entices you to stay on Yahoo.com!

The logic behind this argument is faulty, to say the least, but what worries us is that Yahoo! and its PR people have even considered making it.

What people want to hear is this: “You should search the Web using Yahoo! because Yahoo! delivers (1) better, more targeted and more relevant search results in (2) a way that is easy to read and easy to use.”

Yahoo! gave up on the search relevance argument when they abandoned their own search engine technology in favour of Microsoft’s Bing. Fair enough. That might have been a sensible business decision.

But now it seems that they have given up on the second part on the equation too. They no longer believe that the argument of delivering a better search result presentation will win the them the battle, so they focus on the unique Yahoo! content instead.

It does make sense to market Yahoo! as a news and media publisher. But mixing it up with the search message is self defeating.

Obviously, someone at Yahoo! agrees. The following video is probably not going to make it to the TV screens. But the fact that their PR company DKC even considered making the argument says a lot about Yahoo’s faith in its own future as a major search player.

See also BoomTown: Yahoo Tries to Recover From “It’s Y!ou” Ad Disaster by Attacking Google’s One Box (This Is Going to End in Tears)
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