Yahoo! admits defeat in the search engine race. Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker says, “We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google…It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.”

She then goes on to say, “We have held our own, and we should gain revenue share in the industry as we roll out…new initiatives.” Hmm… interesting even though Yahoo’s share of the search market has dropped from 27% down to 19% in just one year.

I don’t suppose collaborating with the Chinese authorities in jailing a journalist for 10 years helps internet companies conquer the market, neither does being so quick to hand over search data to the US government, which Pam Dixon, executive director for the World Privacy Forum, says can contain personal information.

I guess what goes around comes around even on the internet.

Yahoo!, being Yahoo!, responds here denying everything of course. Notice the patronising tone in the line: “…anyone who’s been following the evolution of Yahoo! Search would have realized is… just plain wrong. While some people immediately realized this, we thought it made sense to briefly recap how focused we are in search…”

Even more interesting are the links they provide to the Yahoo-faithful who immediately (and conveniently) assume that Susan Decker has been misquoted and it’s everyone else who’s nuts and “trigger-happy”. What exactly is there to misquote in the line: “It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search”. Did she say it or not? It needs no interpretation or spin.

Anyway, if you follow their statement in light of Susan Decker’s statement and can smell the back-track then you probably use Google to search the internet