Yahoo! vs. Google on online publicity - who will win?

For most analysts, Yahoo!'s situation seemed very complicated and letal : Yahoo! either accepted billions offered by Microsoft, either cooperate with Google (that meaning the externalization of the search function to Google). Both of them meant the acceptance of defeat. And more than that, both would have meant the drop of brand's fame and the end of a succes story. But Yahoo chose the third option, the most glorious one: to fight against Google on it's own home ground and with it's own weapons, that being the search engine market.

It is worth to take a look at the situation. Both Yahoo and Google earn the most from publicity. But Google earns more from this than Yahoo, event though Yahoo has more users, so a greater potential number of publicity consumers. Don't forget that Yahoo! Mail it's the most popular service of this type on the Internet, Yahoo! Messenger it's almost similar with Instant Messaging in general, Flickr and Del.icio.us are leaders on their market segments, and in a great total, the 50 services and websites owned by Yahoo! generate a fabulous traffic. (Alexa and comScore place Yahoo! websites on the first position in USA, with 130 millions of unique visitors a month.)
Google, in exchange it's an uncontested leader in the search engine market and online applications like Google Maps and Google Earth.

Although they look similar , business models used by the two companies, they are different in tones. While Yahoo! goes for “display advertising” (that means the displaying of banners or images in own websites), based on the huge number of it's visitors, Google is strongly orientated to contextual publicity, based on indexes of millions of web pages and the algorithm of rank displaying (SEO). The advantage of Google comes from the fact that the contextual publicity market (about 40%) it's bigger than the display advertising market (about 30%), and that Google almost owns the entire sector of market, while Yahoo! has to share it with other competitors. Finally, we can judge the dynamics too: Google continues to grow on the market that it dominates, and with the buying of DoubleClick it attacks the display advertising market. For Yahoo!, the only option was to attack the base of Google, the search engine market.

Yahoo attack strategies are very spectacular: opening and going to the so called "semantic web". Open Search platform will allow website owners to control themselves the way in which their pages will be displayed between search results, and even more, will allow third-part users to build new applications on the base of searches returned by Yahoo! Search engine. Although it has the reputetion of a more "opened" company, Google offers limited options on search engine display(for example you cannot get rid of the Adsense ads - the fact that earns billions). Yahoo! has nothing to lose, so it goes beside these restrictions. What is interesting is that Yahoo! announced the support for semantic web, but with very ow support from industry, so here is the point from which the adventure will start.