I don't believe Yahoo has ANY intrinsic value other than its name,
and I certainly dont beleive that is worth teh current share price.
They can be undercut or copied at a whim by one of many suppliers, witness the
following press clipping. ( This is from Computergram, an excellent
email-based daily news service. )
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+ INFOSEEK BOOSTS INTERNET SEARCH ENGINE TO 1,000 SEARCHES
PER SECOND CAPABILITY USING XEROX PARC INDEX TECHNOLOGY
Another lightning piece of technology has slipped through Xerox
Corp's fingers as Infoseek Corp speeds up its Internet search
engine to become 'Ultraseek' - at 1,000 searches per second. The
company's widely-used Internet navigation service - free to
users and paid for by advertising - is one of a handful of
powerful search engines on the Internet that include Digital
Equipment Corp's Alta Vista engine, America Online Inc's
Webcrawler and Yahoo! Corp. Using technology from Xerox's Palo
Alto Research Center, Ultraseek claims the capability to handle
up to 1,000 queries per second, and is intended to build the
largest, near real-time index on the Internet, using the Matisse
object-oriented database from ADB Corp. It is intended to handle
25m Web pages, monitoring them in the space of a week and
updating them as they change. Ultraseek is scheduled to be
generally available in June. Ultraseek uses Xerox's Lexical
Technology developed at PARC. XLT is an advanced word
root-indexing function that provides the ability to relate all
words with a specific root together. Using this means longer
query terms can be processed in a shorter time. In general, with
search engine technology, the more query terms requested by the
user, the slower the process. Infoseek intends Ultraseek to
avoid this as longer and more complex queries can be run in
split second times. On the more extensive queries, Ultraseek can
be many times faster than other engines, the company claims.
Ultraseek runs on a single Sun Microsystems Inc Ultra Enterprise
4000 server at up to 1,000 transactions per second. Indexes can
be run in parallel so that indexing speed is essentially
unlimited.
============================================================
Since there is nothing that "locks" users into Yahoo, I dont see
why there should be a long term future for the stock at more than
a few dollars. Other than the fact the many have heard of it (but how many
of the new users soon to come?), what else has it got going for it?
I guess I should put my money where my mouth is and short the stock,
but of course stock price is based on two things;
Intrinsic Value
Market Perception
and I'm not smart enough to know when the 2nd will catch up with the 1st!
There is so much hype associated with anything to do with the net at the
moment that its probably worth 100 - 1000% on a stocks price until reality bites
(a few Quarters worth of resu;ts maybe?).
(thats why I just bough ALMI - an Internet associated product)
Good luck whatever you do
Joe C |
