'We will convince people to come to Yahoo! for Search'

Yahoo! is at a crucial juncture. While Google is making it search all over to stay in the lead, Microsoft is upping its ante as it has always done with one or the other new product. Yet this $5.5 billion firm has gone on the front foot in taking up the challenge.

Yahoo!, which is among the brands with a top recall, during the past couple of years has lagged in the search segment, losing quite a bit of ground to Google.

So Yahoo!, with its half a billion users generating billions of emails on a daily basis, is looking at ways to make people come to it to search.

Yahoo! co-founder David Filo, who along with Jerry Yang, co-founded this legendary firm when they were at Stanford, said in Bangalore, "Google is strong in search and we are investing a lot in refining this technology to convince people to come to Yahoo! for Search,"

Bangalore houses one of Yahoo's key research and development centres with close to 700 professionals working on almost all of Yahoo's products which most of us get to use right through the day in our lives.

"Competition is everywhere. The very beauty of the Internet is that anyone with a good idea can spring up to become a competitor. Ten years ago when we started out, a lot of people said that we will not be able to compete with Microsoft. They had all the resources to make us irrelevant. Yet, we have come on top to be among the most endearing brands," Filo said.

To fight back, Yahoo! is working to take Search beyond what it is today. Aspects like personalised search, social search, developing focussed crawling techniques are the issues being debated and delivered at the marketplace. "We want to make our search more comprehensive and more relevant," he stressed.

"Search is a part of our profile. We have a whole lot of other communication products like the email and messenger in which we are strong and others are trying to catch up. Google has established itself in search and they are looking at how to get traction outside of search," Filo notes.

"Today, we are at a point where our leadership position in certain products has to be worked to our advantage and it is left to us to stay competitive. We are strong in certain products and markets, and so are others in their areas," he added.

As is the wont with all visiting executives who house their R&D sites in India, Filo too is not short of words to praise India's prowess.

"We are bigger than we thought we will be. India is an important market for us and we view this as a huge opportunity down the road. As people get better connectivity to the internet there will arise opportunities we will take advantage of," Filo added.

Yahoo! is also looking at taking its products to all contact points which a consumer comes in touch with in his daily life.

"We have to look beyond the PC. How to get into mobile and other high-end PDAs are elements of this gameplan which we are focussing heavily on. User-generated content such as uploading their own videos, investing in a wide variety of media properties, community-based stuff are the aspects which will see Yahoo! active on a much larger scale," Filo added.

Another focus is security. Each passing day we get to hear of internet frauds and how is Yahoo! responding to this? "The entire industry is working towards measures to safeguard user's data. And so is Yahoo!. For example, to overcome phishing, we are beta-testing a product where a user can configure a colour combination for his login page to avoid giving one's login details to any cyber-pirate," he noted. So the battle to secure the marketplace with ideas goes on.