Yahoo's approach is safe, but is it the best approach?

I mentioned that Google is essentially an infrastructure to aggregate content and present it as its own content while Google does not pay any loyalty to copyright owners or get permission from them. Other search engines including Yahoo, MSN and Ask do something very similar, but Yahoo has a different mechanism additionally. Specially, a part of Yahoo infrastructure is designed to work with copyright owners instead of simply ignore them. For example, Yahoo News contributors are all Yahoo's partners; Yahoo does not aggregate content from the copyright owner in Yahoo News if there is no agreement between Yahoo and the copyright owner. Yahoo Movies is another example. Yahoo and movie studios form partnership, and Yahoo creates Yahoo Movies. (Google consistently refuses to work with or form partnership with any copyright owner.) Whether this will give Yahoo advantage or not is debatable, but we can observe a sharp contract between Google and Yahoo when we observe how these two companies interpret copyright.

Getting content from those who have weak representation

Google's strength comes from the fact that Google gets content from those who have weak representation, namely those who make websites for hobby, those who are self-employed and create websites to generate revenue and small businesses that set up websites to generate revenue. Google itself does not produce any content; it only creates infrastructure to aggregate content. One of major benefits of Google's doing this is that they can practically ignore copyright laws; more specifically, Google does not need to pay loyalty or get permission from copyright owners. Google needs to pay loyalty or get permission in principle, and copyright owners can claim their copyright legally. However, it requires an enormous financial resource to claim their copyright; filing a lawsuit against Google is out of question. Consequently, Google essentially gets content for free. This is how Google cuts cost to acquire copyrighted content, and this is where Google's strength comes from.

I wouldn't buy Google

Google offers very interesting services and has great potential of generating more revenue and making much bigger profit. Google News has not been monetized yet, though it is probably the most popular or second most popular news site on the internet (Yahoo News and Google News are probably #1 and #2). Google Images has not been monetized yet; Google Images does not run ads like Google Search and Froogle. Google earth is a very interesting product, and it has not been monetized yet. Google has a lot of potential. That said, stock is traded at $279.99 today (August 18th) and the company's market cap is $77.77 billion, while its revenue is $4.48 billion. Market cap is bigger than revenue times 17. Market evaluates Google too high in my opinion, and I wouldn't buy Google.