Competition

Yahoo Teams Up With HP On Search Engine
Post inspired by Business Week article linked above 


It’s off to the races in the Internet mania that are search engines!!!! In a fight to obtain more ad revue, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have teamed up in the hopes of staying in the game with hot competition. Recently, Google, the largest search engine market, teamed up with Dell, who has a large market share in personal computer sales. Their agreement placed Google search engines in the toolbars of Dell’s computers. Yahoo trails second behind Google in the search engine market and hopes that its new agreement with HP (to have the yahoo search engine it all HP home computer toolbars) will give it the boost it needs to be number one.

As you heard from previous posts of mine, Yahoo is in talks with Facebook to acquire the rights to its social network. Yahoo has a long standing position as the most-viewed web site but it is being challenged for that spot now by News Corp.’s MySpace.com. This kind of pressure might be one of the reasons Yahoo has gone ahead to join up with HP.

So why all this drama over getting these deals? A major part of it is getting those precious advertising revenues. Being the number one search engine certainly gets the attention of prospective buyers of advertisement space. They are hoping to place a minimum number of advertisements to save on cost but want to place these advertisements on a website that will pay off with the number of viewers that will see it. The larger the number of viewers; the better it is for everyone involved. It is the hopes of the advertisers that through the viewing of their advertisements; eprocurement will take place. This is the when purchases are made via the internet, intranet, or extranet. In this case it would be through the internet.

I think this gives great opportunities for the consumers. Companies are constantly competing against each other and at the same time bettering their company to better serve their customers. At the end of the day, it is the revenue they receive from their customers that they are worried about. For them to get their advertiser clients on board with them, they have to dish out plenty of money in advancement, information, and tools to keep the internet users coming back. It is the internet user who, in a way, holds all the cards. Falling “hit” numbers are warning signs for companies such as Yahoo and Google so that is why Yahoo, who has started seeing these “falling numbers” trend is trying to tailor more of its services in areas, such as HP computers, where it can be easily accessed and viewed by internet users.

In comes down to a tight race between portal and search engines hoping to cash in. The stakes are high and these companies are willing to make huge billion dollar investments to keep themselves at the top. Like they say, “You have to invest big, to earn big” and that’s just the philosophy Yahoo, Google, and others big names are following.

The Ruminator