Filed under: Bad news, Industry, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO)

Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) has had several opportunities to “fix” itself recently. One was its new Panama search technology. Shareholders were eager to see it work as a better competitor to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). So far, it has barely moved the needle.

Some analysts hoped that the company’s new management would cut costs to improve margins. A figure of 20% of the staff has been suggested. But, if anyone at Yahoo! has been pushed out beyond a few management types, no one knows about it.

Yahoo!’s hopes now appear to ride on the back of better targeting for online display ads. Delivering marketing messages based on the user’s behavior is the “next big thing” for internet advertising. Unfortunately, other web portals and Google have their own ad-serving and behavior-targeting products.

What the problem boils down to is that the market still tends to value Yahoo! on its ability to get consumers to use it to search the internet. Yahoo!’s piece of the search market is a proxy for its success or failure.

The new comScore search engine figures for November are out, and Yahoo!’s piece of that market fell .4% to 22.4% from October. It may not seem a lot, but at this rate, it would not be many months before Yahoo!’s share of market falls below 20%.

Yahoo! stock is having trouble holding $24. In late October, things seemed more promising and Wall Street believed the company would do something significant to change its business for the better. The stock traded at $33.99.

It won’t be back there again soon.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 at 11:45 pm and is filed under Stocks Money News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.