There were many cheers as well as sadness when Yahoo’s CEO, Terry Semel announced he would resigning his position. There was much controversy between board members about his salary and his competence in the job. Jerry Yang, the co-founder and board member of Yahoo, will be replacing Terry Semel which excited a lot of investors and other business people. Usually when a CEO steps down it isn’t a good sign but with the recent and consistent decline in Yahoo’s profits, many are interested to see what Jerry Yang can do with the company. During Terry Semel’s resignation he said, “This is the time for new executive leadership, with different skills and strengths, to step in and drive the company to realize its full potential. It is the right thing to do, and the right time is now.” Terry Semel reportedly made nearly $40 million dollars last year as the CEO of Yahoo in contrast to the CEO of Google, Eric Shmidt who only take a $1 dollar salary but receive stock which motivates him even more to make his company successful.

Many people, including Wall Street investors, are excited to see founders of companies return as CEO’s because of their love and drive for the product they originally created. Steve Jobs of Apple is one of the best examples. Terry Semel started out with a bang and lasted nearly 6 years with rising stock prices but they have dropped a heavy 30 percent in the last year and a half. Yahoo’s stock has already begun to rise since the resignation announcement just a few days ago. Terry Semel has had some good CEO experience at Warner Bros and the Warner Music Group but many are unsure why Yahoo has competed so poorly and why Semel wasn’t able to keep up with the Internet giant, Google. The quick rise and Internet dominance of Google since it went public in late 2004 when it overtook Yahoo as the number one search company, marked the decline of Yahoo. Google is an extraordinary example of a break out company. They now make more money in one quarter than Yahoo does in an entire year. Google stock is now worth about six times as much as when it was when it went public. They continue to add new and innovative products while Yahoo appears to remain stagnant. Both companies continue to acquire other companies but Google has been much more successful in their acquisitions and have had the funds to pick up some well known and very complimentary companies.

Although Yahoo is still fighting to keep their number 2 spot in the search engine world, they really only have room to grow. While most people still stick with Google, with some new products and improvements in its search capabilities, they can regain some of their market share and stock price. It’s unlikely they will ever really compete with Google but if Yang learns some lessons from Steve Jobs, they can make a big impact.

Google has been dominating the search industry for years now and we are only seeing the gap between them and the next best search engine widen. Many new search engines have come and gone trying to challenge Google and the ones that have been around for years seem to just be holding still. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has teamed up with Amazon.com to create a new Internet search engine that they hope will rival Google and Yahoo.

Wikipedia has chosen to use their existing open-access style web site to create this new search engine which is being called Wikia Search. Jimmy Wales and one of his money sources, Amazon.com, is creating Wikia Search, because they believe that with the enormous growth of Google, its search results have become susceptible to manipulation and spam. “Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’ and you will not get any useful results” said the 40 year old Wikipedia founder.

The creating of Wikia would be a completely new approach to the way search engines bring back results. Google, Yahoo and all the other major search engines have incorporated a computer algorithm which determines the relevancy of a web site to what the user entered in the search engine. Each search engine has a different algorithm and will show different results. Google is known as having the best and most relevant results for most searches. Wikipedia’s Wikia would avoid the computer algorithm all together and switch to its online encyclopedia style of human edited content. “Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision. This page is good, this page sucks. Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way” said Wales. Jimmy Wales’ theory will replace the computer algorithm with human editors who will decide which pages are the most relevant to a search term.

Wikipedia has become increasingly popular over the years and people seem to like the fact that the content is user generated and can be edited. This new style of search engine has the possibility to do well because of the already popular Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales uses the example of people manipulating Google and Yahoo search engines but with human edited search results, you can still have the same issues. What is to stop a Wikia editor from taking a bribe to rank someone number 1? It doesn’t even have to be that dramatic. The human editors of this search engine may unintentionally have favoritism for one web site or another. There is yet to be a strong contender to Google and only time will tell if Wikipedia’s new search engine can seriously compete with the search giant.