The CEO of Google’s biggest current rival in search engine marketing has claimed that the company’s focus on search could be a potential weakness in the near future.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has seen her company’s intake of the search engine marketing dollar plummet over the past decade as Google’s share of the user market has dramatically expanded. However, this revenue has always formed a smaller section of the Yahoo business model, which operates PPC adverting platforms and a range of content generation, hosting and consumer services on a network of online properties.
Her comments came in a response to a question by BBC news technology reporter Jonathan Fildes, on whether or not Yahoo’s varied network of sites had an overall brand image.
“Google is going to have a problem because Google is only known for search” said Bartz. “It’s half our business – it’s 99.9% of their business.”
Ms Bartz said that for Google to remain “interesting”, it “has to grow a company the size of Yahoo every year.”
Yahoo may have lost a considerable market share to Google in search - once its core business - over the past decade but its main portal is still one of the largest sites in the world, with an audience of more than 200m users according to Nielsen figures. The company has more than 70 websites and services and some are available in 20 languages around the world.
Earlier this year Yahoo’s head of search, Shashi Seth, said that the company was still competitive in the search market. “Yahoo has been in search, is in search, and will continue to be in search” he said in an interview with the BBC regarding the ongoing deal between Microsoft and Yahoo.
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