Reno - 10:17 pm on Oct 24, 2006 (gmt 0)

we'd almost be back to the G we fell in love with seven years ago again. aka: a usable search engine.

Things began to noticeably go south when they went public. Now, they are in large part answering to stockholders and that means always exceeding the forecasts of the financial analysts -- when the numbers look good, the dividends are sweet.

I was in Louisville KY last weekend riding along with my brother-in-law, who is simply a regular web user but by no means any kind of geek. He said he was trying to find a website with information about colleges in Vermont, for his son. According to him, he first went to Google and got nothing of use, then used the same search at Yahoo and immediately found a website that gave him exactly what he wanted.

That is perhaps a meaningless anecdote, or perhaps it is an example of how G is being distracted from its core focus as it expands it's operations more and more into other areas (aka: income producing). Time will tell.

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