Phrenzie.com

Yahoo is using viral marketing to push its search engine past Google.

Before I go there, I gotta admit, while I’m a free market kind of guy, I also don’t some companies that absolutely dominate a space (errr…unless I own stock in them at a good buy-in price). 

So when I see Google killing the competition in search, I want to see someone else to temper them (I don’t own stock in Google).

So Yahoo’s latest idea is to have other companies build search engines using Yahoo’s search technology, thereby saving these companies the cash necessary to build from scratch (Yahoo estimate: $300 million).  In return, Yahoo will sell ads on through those search engines.

I think it’s brilliant (barring a few possibly filled holes).  You have other developers customizing, and more importantly, marketing your technology, while you generate money through that method.  What it does is instantly make Yahoo bigger without the time, people and money to do it otherwise.

Classic viral marketing, in another form.

 The possible whole are the kinds of financial deals Yahoo would work the companies.  The NYTimes mentions Me.dium as an example of a partner-company that Yahoo has signed up (financial terms are uncertain).  Me.dium is a search engine (not yet fully released) that allows users to see what other websites their friends are going too.  The theory is that people place more weight on what their friends say than through other means.  This is true, for good or bad (if my friends are looking at ill-informed sites, then those are the ones that will probably pop up first in the search).