I must agree that Yahoo are a little too sneaky in the way they do stuff. The thing with Google is that when you think Google you think search. People are even using the name Google as a verb when they speak. "Why don't you just Google it". With Yahoo instead you don't think of it for search, you think of it for its messenger, groups and whatever other services they offer. They've obviously done a great job with that and if Google were to start offering all these services I think that they would have a hard time competing against Yahoo.

It's going to be hard to beat Google in search mainly because people associate search with it, and the fact that it does provide good results compared to the other SEs. I'm happy to hear that Yahoo is dedicated to making their search #1 because it's not healthy for one company to control a whole industry sector.

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Fabio