Google is the search engine of choice of richer, more Net-savvy Americans, reports Infoworld quoting a survey of 1,000 US Internet users conducted by investment banking and research firm S.G. Cowen. But it’s not just the choice of the rich. More than half the American Internet users favour Google – 52 per cent, according to the survey. Yahoo is second with 22 per cent, MSN and AOL tie for third place with 9 per cent and Ask Jeeves rounds out the top five with 5 per cent. I think the results will be similar if people in other countries were surveyed as well.

But Yahoo is getting to be as exciting as Google now — not as a search engine but for various other features. The My Yahoo feeds offer more choice than Google News. And Yahoo will be taking on Skype,  offering telephone service through its instant-messaging system that will let users dial regular phone numbers using their computers or receive calls from conventional phones. Yahoo already has the best online digital photo-sharing service: Flickr.com. And now it is letting readers answer each other’s questions  on Yahoo!Answers, which is unlike anything Google has to offer.

Google has a better blogsearch engine,  Yahoo!Search with News isn’t as specialised as that.

But Yahoo is finding other ways to feel the pulse of the bloggers. I am not talking of Yahoo 360 (is that what it’s called?) but its acquisition of del.icio.us. This social bookmarks site, which claims to have more than 300,000 users, will be providing Yahoo with the same kind of information that is publicised by Technorati and Bloglines — which was recently acquired by Ask Jeeves.

I love Bloglines and My Yahoo. I only wish del.icio.us had a better/simpler help page and was a little more organised. Maybe Yahoo will make it better.

PS: Salon nicely explains why Yahoo bought del.icio.us in an piece called: Yahoo Bets On The Group Mind. It says: "Del.icio.us describes itself as a ‘collection of favorites — yours and everyone else’s’. Perhaps the simplest way to explain it is as a way for people to share their online bookmarks with each other. And maybe the most complicated way to describe it is to say that it is an example of the collective intelligence, the group mind, of the Internet in action. Yahoo’s purchase of the site is an intriguing sign that tapping the grass-roots-driven power of online ‘communities’ is a key strategy for the search giant’s future growth.”