Yahoo vs. Google: A Reprise

(MoneyWatch)  Amidst reports of an imminent executive shakeup at the top this week at Yahoo, it's worth noting that the company's performance has been improving lately. Its share of the domestic search market increased by half a percentage in January, to 21 percent, while Google's fell by half of a percent, to 63 percent.

That is still a three-to-one ratio for Google, of course, but it's a positive sign that Yahoo may have reversed its long, slow slide toward oblivian.

In unrelated news today, Yahoo's nead of news and information, Neeraj Khemlani, quit the company to join Hearst. Only a month into the post-Jerry Yang era under new CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo is clearly going through a major league reorganization.

It has never been a fait accompli that the long term struggle between the search giants would end up in the favor of Google. Yahoo employs much stronger product management than Google, imho; in fact, I seriously doubt that there is anyone inside the Mountain View headquarters that can even name all of its disparate products.

In addition, Google kills off more products than most companies create in a decade: Lively, Dodgeball, Catalog Search, Jaiku, and RadioAds all recently were tossed in the Recycle can, for example. It's not that the technology behind these efforts was bad, according to insiders, it's that there was no professional product management available.

By contrast, Yahoo's major product suites appear to be much better managed, to an outsider's eye. Fantasy Sports, Finance, Maps-Directions, and Buzz, all seem superior in most ways to the offerings of competitors. Google Maps offers fancier technology, however, and with the addition of Latitude, which allows users to pinpoint their friends' current whereabouts via cellphone, Google has raised the bar on social networking once again.