What should you do when your competition leaves a loose end?

Will you leave it as-is or tie a noose around your competitor’s neck?

Yahoo! chose the later and very smartly used Google’s popular search engine to prove that Y! is more acceptable than Google (and even sex).

Call it great marketing or creative noose-ing, Y! has got this right – perfectly!

Wondering what am I talking about? Here is the story:
Slashdot broke the news that Yahoo was the most searched term on Google (yeah! more than sex!), so Yahoo! immediately used that as a chance to use this info to it’s benefit.

And how did they do it? They used Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory-

According to Maslow, sex partially addresses both our Physiological and Love needs..But, I guess it’s safe to say that Yahoo! is either satisfying a user’s Esteem or Self-Actualization needs.

In short, Yahoo! claims to fulfill user’s *self-actualization* needs, while Google is just another service which people use.
As Nicholas Carr puts it, “Googling is bad for the libido. Consider yourself warned.”

But that leaves an interesting discussion – Why do people search for Yahoo in Google? -
DailyDomainer points out that much of it is attributed to the fact that Google’s search box has actually replaced browser’s address bar.
Very true.

But that still doesn’t answer why do people look for Yahoo so much? People will use the same search box for myspace/youtube etc. – but why Yahoo?

IMHO, Yahoo’s services are considered a lot better than Google. Apart from search engine, the only other rocking product from Google’s factory is Gmail.

Look at Yahoo’s product suite – Y! News, Finance, Y! Q&A, and in general, Y! has a strong & loyal community compared to Google’s. [otherwise what else could be the explanation of Google's Q&A failure?]

Infact, there is a clear diff. between Yahoo’s and Google’s acquisition strategy too – Yahoo! has acquired community products like Flickr, Del.icio.us, MyBlogLog; while Google is into technology acquisition [except YouTube].

And of course, Google has turned arrogant, while Y! is listening to it’s customers more effectively [case in point-Y! allows comments on it's corporate blogs while Goog is still planning to].

Have you ever searched for Yahoo on Google? What made you do so?

Tags: Interestingness