Yahoo and CNET?

The Motley Fool has an interesting article speculating on a marriage between CNET and Yahoo.

This sounds plausible. When Yahoo dropped Google as its licensed search engine a few years ago, it ceded the search market to Google. Typical fear of competitors. "We don't want to support a competitor, so let's offer an inferior product to our customers instead. They'll use it because they're already on our site."

Instead, Google got all the momentum with a better product--momentum that could have gone to Yahoo as well.

Yahoo's new strategy is to retreat back into portal-dom. All its acquisitions and recent announcements, including Yahoo Food and a deal with Beliefnet to expand its personals offerings, are designed to keep people on Yahoo's site, instead of sending them off in search of content elsewhere. Yahoo is increasingly becoming a media company.

With this approach, Yahoo is trying to avoid direct competition with Google. I'm sure Yahoo will continue to try to improve its search engine, but the executives apparently believe they have more opportunity elsewhere.

I don't know how much opportunity there is to make money off online content, however. Most content companies, including Yahoo and CNET, have never learned the Google lesson: ads work better when they're not obnoxious. Their click rate is abysmal, and both companies are suffering as a result.

A marriage could end up being a long-established fatal strategy. Combine two struggling companies on the theory that the will add up to one successful company. Ususally the result is that both decline more rapidly.

Let Yahoo have the content. Google has the proven business model.