GYM search is the nick name some Internet pundits give to the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
By any measure, Google owns at least 60% of the search traffic on the Internet as of today. It is more than double the combination of Yahoo and MSN's search traffic. I wonder why Microsoft would like to buy Yahoo in the first place. Since Microsoft and Yahoo walked away from the merger talk, there are investors want to force the marriage. The saga has not ended yet.
Yahoo and Microsoft has pledged to improve their search engine before. If you look closer to the press release, the emphasis was mostly on the ad platform. It seemed Yahoo and Microsoft's executives believed their search engines were only inferior in that aspect. People go to search sites for many different things. Maybe searching for a product or a service is the most common drive. But people also use the search engine to conduct many other activities, like doing homework, expanding knowledge, or simply to kill time. It is quite natural for a person to stick with a search engine which fulfills most of his or her search needs, for shopping or something else. If Yahoo and Microsoft's managers still look at the top use case only, they missed the long tail. It is the long tail that wags the dog.
I recommend everyone to see this video from the Google IO conference session: Underneath the Covers at Google: Current Systems and Future Directions (video). If Google did it, it is a proof by itself that can be done. If Microsoft is willing to spend more than 44 billion dollars to buy Yahoo, Microsoft can build a truly competitive search engine by one tenth of that cost. The search engine is the toll booth to the Internet. It is possible and it is imperative for Yahoo, Microsoft, or whoever competes with Google to have a state-of-the-art search engine. It is the same rationale that Apple never gives up its own operating system.
