April 28, 2004

"Yahoo is a company that has always had good competitors and Google will be a good competitor".

"There is plenty of room for Yahoo to thrive and for Google to thrive," Semel told reporters on the sidelines of a Milken Institute conference.

Chief Executive and Chairman Terry Semel on Tuesday shrugged off the possibility that a widely anticipated public offering by search engine operator Google Inc. would hurt the older Web company.

Yahoo has an estimated 5 percent stake in Google, which is expected this week to announce plans for an initial public stock offering that could value the company at around $20 billion.

But Yahoo also has expanded far beyond its core portal business. Last year, the Sunnyvale, California-based company invested more than $1 billion in acquisitions to challenge Google in the lucrative business of Web search and key-word advertising.

Google, meanwhile, recently announced plans to get into the free e-mail business now dominated by Yahoo and Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) MSN Internet unit.

Semel, a former Hollywood studio head credited with diversifying and reigniting revenues at Yahoo, told a panel at the conference that the nature of search was also changing as customers looked for search engines to allow comparison shopping across the Internet rather than approaching a host site as a place to buy.

"Search has become a lot more than we think of search," he said.

Source: Reuters

Read Serge Thibodeau's daily blogs on search engines at Serge Thibodeau Live. We strongly suggest you bookmark our web site by clicking here.

Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it.

Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in all the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and all the others.