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...taming of Yahoo!'s many-headed beast echoes the task Semel took on after arriving in 2001. He trimmed the 44 business units to four, and the company rededicated itself to search by developing a new engine and buying Overture, which pioneered search ads. Yahoo!'s stock price nearly tripled in Semel's first three years, but its search tools still trailed Google...
...creating content, a strategy it later cut back on, and had fallen further behind Google in generating revenue from its huge audience. Last November an agent provocateur emerged in Brad Garlinghouse, a senior vice president, whose leaked memo became known as the Peanut Butter Manifesto. He argued passionately that Yahoo! was wasting its talent by distributing its resources like peanut butter on a widening slice of bread. "The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular," Garlinghouse wrote. "I hate peanut butter. We all should." He criticized the company...
Significantly, Semel (who declined TIME's request for an interview) is getting Yahoo! to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. "There's always been some ambiguity about whether it's a tech company or a media company," says Stewart Butterfield, Yahoo!'s director of product management and co-founder of the photo site Flickr, which Yahoo! acquired in March 2005. "But there's been a shift in the internal messaging. I never hear execs refer to Yahoo! as a media company. A year and a half ago, there wasn't a satisfying articulation of what...
...Flickr deal turned out to be a critical one. Butterfield says he chose to sell to Yahoo! rather than Google because the former was a more disciplined company. "At that time, Google was especially chaotic," says Butterfield. Google bought YouTube, which has generated a mountain of buzz, but Yahoo! has quietly leveraged Flickr, Answers and Del.icio.us, among other recent acquisitions and launches, to get its audience--which includes nearly half of the world's Web users--to spend more time on its network of sites. Yahoo!'s new ad system will capitalize on their presence--and on data it collects...
...Yahoo! is a more popular website than Google but not as lucrative. Yahoo!'s 500 million monthly visitors easily exceeds Google's 380 million. But Google searches each generate about 30% to 40% more revenue. "Yahoo! is three to four years behind Google in the development of its algorithm," says Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets...