Journalists hammer Yahoo on declining marketshare

If Yahoo’s search executives thought they were going to change journalists’ perception of their company as increasingly irrelevant in search, it looks like they were wrong. During the question-and-answer session at the end of the company’s search event today, reporters repeated one question over and over: Why should we buy this message?
It didn’t help that Yahoo didn’t announce any big improvements today, but instead highlighted recently-launched or soon-to-come features. I thought some of those features, such as Sketch-a-Search, looked cool, but certainly they didn’t mark any major improvements or shifts in strategy. Shashi Seth, vice president of search products, said the point of today’s event wasn’t to make any big announcements, but rather to “clear the air” around misconceptions that Yahoo is giving up on search, and to “set the stage” for future announcements that might be more impressive.
“What we are talking about is fundamental shift and completely new line of product that actually changes the game entirely,” he said.
Seth also explained that Yahoo’s strength lies in properties like Yahoo Finance, Yahoo defending, and Flickr — which are not “core assets” for competitors like Google — so it has an opportunity to drive search traffic from those sites.
He also argued that some of Yahoo’s loss in marketshare, as shown by firms like comScore and Hitwise, was caused because Yahoo has pulled out of deals to have its search run in toolbars and devices, deals that Seth said weren’t profitable. When it comes to organic search, Seth said marketshare hasn’t dropped that much, and he also suggested that he’s a little skeptical about how outside firms measure searches.
“There’s some magic going on around how search volume is counted,” he said.
Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer products for Yahoo Search, added that he’s been at a company that appeared to be past its glory days before — Apple during “the dark years.” Yahoo will come back, just as Apple did, he said.
“I understand that we’re going to need to have some wins for folks to start to have confidence in us again,” Cornett said. “We will have some wins … You’re going to see them building and building and so the momentum is going to shift.”