There are reports of Microsoft offering to buy Yahoo’s search business.

My take on it?

Yahoo should sell.

Although it’s too early to declare that Internet search is being commoditized, Google’s lead as the preferred search engine means that anyone else trying to compete in that space is just wasting time.

Think of it, in order for Yahoo to continue to compete with Google as a search engine, it needs to invest in continually improving the search technology. Then there’s all the storage and infrastructure costs etc. At the same time, Yahoo’s search monetization is much less than that of Google.

It is going to be difficult for Yahoo to give up search. After all, that company started off in that space. All that emotional attachment to the past and talk about “core business” will get in the way of cooler heads. I don’t know if Jerry Yang will have the clout, guts and objectivity to jettison the search business.

Yahoo has a bunch of other properties which, IMHO, have more value than the search engine: Flickr, Yahoo Groups, YIM, www.yahoo.com etc

Flickr, in particular, has a pretty good future. Almost all popular social networking sites allow you to import photos automatically from Flickr. This makes it the default choice for social networkers who have tons of photos to share. Adobe’s new Photoshop Express also links to Flickr, which I thought was very clever of Adobe. I have not tried out Flickr’s new video capabilities, but I think that Flickr has a lot of room for growth.

Likewise for Yahoo Groups. If you are looking for dedicated mailing lists for your running club or MBA classmates, you don’t have to look further than Yahoo Groups. I have used Google Groups and Yahoo is still much better.

So Yahoo should objectively identify properties that have real value to users and room for growth. It should then dedicate resources to building up these properties to make them the “default” destination for their respective categories. Yahoo should also find ways to link these properties together seamlessly so that end users don’t get the impression that they are dealing with very disparate websites. Google does a really bad job of this.

Monetization? Well, just go with Google.

Oh, and take that money from Microsoft for the search business.