Does Yahoo have any Alternate Plan for its Search Engine?

The recent Microsoft-Yahoo search deal seems to be going through a rough patch as it faces many regulatory hurdles. This leaves one wondering if Yahoo has a Plan B in sight especially after its CEO, Carol Bartz, told in a New York Times interview that the company is not in a position to run Search on its own. This statement is in complete contrast to the earlier one that came out in June before the announcement of the deal; Bartz said that Yahoo has nothing whatsoever to do with Microsoft.

But in the later interview, she mentioned that Yahoo has decided to sell Search as it cannot match Microsoft and Google in this business due to the level of investment. This statement can cause serious damage to the deal as no buyer will be interested in paying a high price if they think that the seller is desperate or has no alternative. Meanwhile a lot of high-ranking employees are quitting Yahoo, the most recent one being Doug Cutting who left last month. I believe that these people were just smart enough to foresee that Yahoo was done as a search engine.

In a recent television interview, Bartz once again pushed the fact that user interface changes will enable Yahoo to once again be a competing search tool which according to me is a complete hogwash. She also underplayed the role of Search saying people these days hardly spend any time using this tool. Yahoo might be a leader in many other areas but it can never match Google which recently made its search box bigger; though simple, this was a highly effective move which has only fetched the site more and more users.

Bartz has been seriously trying to marginalize the importance of the search tool; no matter how hard she tries the fact remains that search engines are the most popular internet activity after email. If the Yahoo-Microsoft search deal does not come through, the company will have do some serious thinking on how to revive its search tool.

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