Yahoo has not given up on search after all. In a new product called Search Direct, they try to outGoogle Google in terms of instant results. With Google, if you start typing in LeBron James you’ll get a list of links to pages about James. With this new Yahoo system, you’ll get that plus pop-ups of James’s stats and other information about him. Yahoo outsourced the back end functionality of its search operations to Microsoft a while back but this is a front end proposition. Will this make people stop using Google and switch over to Yahoo?*

• no.