I think it would be wrong to say that Yahoo has always been a search company. It's also a mistake to say they've never competed and tried to build their own sea

I think it would be wrong to say that Yahoo has always been a search company. It's also a mistake to say they've never competed and tried to build their own search product. But they really never have been a "search company" in the way that Google is. They are probably the number two internet property in terms of page views. If google has 70% of the search market and Yahoo has less than 20%, Yahoo couldn't possibly be competitive in terms of page views if they really were primarily in the search business.