Yahoo to compete with Google

I’ve always heard the term, “Google it!” when someone needs to find out information on something, but I’ve never heard the saying, “Yahoo it!”

Yahoo has upgraded its online search engine in order to compete with Google’s popularity, according to to USA Today. The new search engine is intended to improve Yahoo’s reputation and provide more sources such as links, pictures, videos, etc.

The article states:

In August, Yahoo had a 23% share of the U.S. search market compared with 56.5% for Google, according to the most recent data from comScore Media Metrix. At the beginning of 2005, Yahoo's market share stood at 32%, just slightly behind Google at 35%, based on different measurement techniques used at that time by Media Metrix.

Yahoo isn’t really trying to re-invent itself, according to the article, but rather it’s playing catch-up to other popular search engines like Google and Ask.com and Yahoo’s new search engine is said to be similar to the two.

I rarely use Yahoo anymore because I’m so attached to Google, but I do have an e-mail account with both. When I was in high school, the most popular e-mail accounts were either Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL.com. Now, I’m seeing less of those, and more gmail accounts. I often heard people complaining about how their yahoo accounts do not filter spam very well. Which makes me curious to ask, why doesn’t Yahoo upgrade their e-mail service?

So I dug in little more and I found this article, also by USA Today, about Yahoo’s $350 million purchase with Zimbra Inc. Zimbra is an e-mail service that serves large corporations like Comcast Corp. and H&R Block, Inc.

According to the article:

Yahoo's free e-mail service recently has been losing traffic, according to the research firm comScore Media Metrix. In August, Microsoft's Live Hotmail service attracted 255.3 million visitors worldwide to eclipse Yahoo's e-mail traffic of 254.9 million, which represented a 1% decrease from the same time last year, Media Metrix said.
Google's Gmail ranked a distant third at 82.9 million worldwide visitors, up 64% from last year. Google opened its e-mail service to all comers seven months ago.

"Zimbra's tremendous talent and innovative technology will help to extend our core mail offerings, further strengthening our strong leadership position in this space," said CEO of Yahoo Jerry Yang to USA Today.

I still prefer Google to Yahoo anyday, but one has to wonder, with all these technological advances, will it be enough for Yahoo to catch up to Google? And will the phrase, “Yahoo it!” become a reality?