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The first round was the one on search and they signed a peace treaty, with Google providing search services to Yahoo.

The second round was the one on email: Google declared war, Yahoo defended itself and later tried to counterattack. Google responded by increasing email from 1Gb to 2Gb.

The third round has started, with accent on the number and coolness of search-related services:

In the right corner, wearing blue shorts, the challenger:

• Google personalized homepage ; on the concept of portal, it represents a neat alternative to the MyYahoo page; it integrates RSS news feeds (for a built-in and very limited number of news sites; hopefully they will expand it…), latest Inbox email previews, word of the day, quote of the day.
  Above all, a super cool customizing interface using JavaScript at the maximum: in order to arrange the items on the page, you simply drag them, and they will float and rearrange magically. Cool.

• Google My Search History – prettty cool app, following the steps of Amazon A9: allows you to easily access your.. search history, obviously.
• Still on Google, I was looking on the Google Labs search features, discovering for my amazement pretty cool search options: for instance, searching for movies containing something about a blue pill

In the oposite corner, wearing red shorts, the challengee:

Yahoo has been in a development spree lately, filled with super cool but poorly advertised services:

• Yahoo Search MyWeb goes a step further than Google Search History: you save bookmarks, and they actually save the Web Page, so if the page gets changed over time, you still have a copy somewhere.
• Yahoo Search has a lot of new options : News Search, Local, Video, Travel, People… and, just like the new google homepage, allows you to see at a glance if you’ve got new mail.
• The pretty cool Yahoo Music Store at a monthly fee of 5 $, you can download all the music you want. It will certainly steal a big market share from Napster and the other online music vendors. Some Slashdotters even say that RIAA should consequently not be able to sue illegal music downloaders for astronomical damages like they did till now, since the same music could costed at most 5$/month. Or something like that.
• I see now that Yahoo search also has a Search History you can enable, and a cool page for all search-related shortcuts

Looks like it’s going to be a battle of the giants. Google still has the advantage of coolness and doing stuff of better quality. But Yahoo has really declared war and, in my opinion, currently has the lead on number of services offered and their spread. I wouldn’t bet all my money on Google, that’s for sure.

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