Summary
Yahoo has been surprisingly quiet given the news of their main competitive set. Is it a tactical decision to ride out the first wave of the storm or is there more at play here?
Analysis
Can we admit that Bing has been really effective at taking Yahoo out of the conversation. All the discussion has been around the #3 search engine vs the #1 search engine. Maybe Yahoo is thinking this is just another big ad campaign that will blow over like the Ask.com efforts but they've been quiet and I may make the claim too quiet at a time they claim to be trying to reestablish themselves.
Everyone remembers the big Coke/ Pepsi challenge. The big loser: RC Cola who lost share to both.
Essentially, in the search war challenge, Yahoo's allowed themselves to become RC Cola.
So when Microsoft announces gains in search share & queries in June but leaves out that Google has not actually lost any of their 65%+ share, there's not a whole lot of places to look. It's certainly not all coming from Ask.com.
There seem to be some change agents at Yahoo now and they could very well be saving up for the war rather than fight very early battles. You have to give Yahoo the benefit of the doubt as to how to spend their marketing resources. All three Yahoo, MSN and Google posted stock gains over the past 3 months but percentage wise Yahoo's has been the most modest.
It's also interesting to look at the conversations surrounding Google and Bing on Digg, Reddit... or Yahoo Buzz for that matter. Lots more Google and Bing chatter than Yahoo.
As someone who actively uses a My Yahoo page, I really do want to see Yahoo remain a formidable challenger. That said, everyone knew when Bing was launching and there were murmurs of Google's announcements surrounding their operating system plans
And Yahoo? There's a yodel someplace that needs to be a little bit louder.
