Yahoo not in search anymore?

I was reading this article.

The most sticking comment were from a Yahoo search expert who came from Microsoft:

“Maarek came to Yahoo from Google, where she was instrumental in the development of front-end presentation enhancements such as Google Suggest. In her view, the last decade brought a revolution in the way Web pages are crawled, indexed, and presented to the user: a revolution that saw Google come out a clear winner.”

If Bing is now replacing the Yahoo search engine, Microsoft now owns the data displayed by Yahoo. O’Reilly has been saying for a while I believe that it is all about the data. Does not really matter how much Yahoo claims it is about presentation, I can’t believe this can be correct. Presentation is just so easily copied, that can’t possibly be the only hedge.

With my limited wisdom I believe that what they are really after is another kind of data, the user habits data. If they can collect and harness that data, they can provide the kind of results I have been blogging about targeted to you. If they can achieve that I suppose that might give them the edge.

I can’t help being suspicious, if they do not own the data, they now become dependent on it. Microsoft is not known for his competitors’ friendly tactics. They might require Yahoo to give them a way to gather the same type of data. Or, knowing that Bing powers the search, why would any new user go through Yahoo instead of Bing directly? That can only mean one thing, a slowly decreasing number of users. They are going to have to find the kind of applications that will make users want to stay, some kind of integrated portal to access most of services people would want to access on-line.

If that is the case, Yahoo is becoming the provide of Software as a Service. There is a fierce competition out there with so many areas to be addressed. Who would be able to know which ones to start with and which ones they will focus on first. If I am right, which would be a small miracle, we should see more applications coming at of Yahoo starting with a better email/IM (oh wait, I think they have already done that).