Yahoo!: Yesterdays News?

Google's prowess continues to rise at a feverish pace among Internet consumers as well as in the realm of advertising. Meanwhile, Yahoo's future in search and social networking remains in question.

Google these days. Consequently, YouTube. According to the MySpace in August, giving the search giant an enormous presence in the social networking market. But this next tidbit has to be the icing on the cake. At the time of this report, a bug in the Yahoo! Search Marketing interface has left many of the company's advertising partners without any kind of functionality for nearly three whole days! According to Information Week reports in a recent article that J.D. Power and Associates ranked Yahoo! Messenger at the top of the list of instant messaging providers. This marks the second year in a row that Yahoo's IM client has been named number one in the J.D. Power rankings. However, Google doesn't plan to take a back seat in the Instant Messaging market for much longer. The company's recent integrate communication between the two instant messaging clients. With all that being said, a simpler comparison may lie in the sheer volume of monetary assets between the two companies. Google boasts a resume of $11 billion in cash and a total value of $131 billion. "In poker terms, Google is the dominating chip stack," comments RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan in the New York Times. Conversely, Yahoo holds $4 billion in cash and carries a total value of $34 billion, which would appear to position the company as the short stack at the table. So what does Yahoo have to do in order to separate itself and step out of Google's ever-growing shadow? Technology news this week is laden with spicy rumors about Yahoo's prospective acquisition of Facebook, potentially in response to Google's deal with YouTube. But is that really the answer to all of the questions surrounding the company's current direction? New York Times columnist Saul Hansell offers an interesting Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl Bookmark Murdok: Joe is a staff writer for latest ebusiness news.