Bad Timing For Yahoo!

Earlier this month, Yahoo!'s shares hit a 52-week high following the announcement of Yahoo! Go Mobile, a service that will allow users to conduct searches and access their email and photos as well as look at popular features such as news over cell phones. On Tuesday, shares rose 21 cents to $40.11.

Investors expect Yahoo! to benefit from the soaring popularity of search, but not to the same extent as Google. Yahoo! also is being helped by the continuing shift of advertising dollars from traditional media, including newspapers and television, to online companies, because it lets companies efficiently track their spending.

Forrester Research estimates that U.S. search-engine marketing spending will hit $11.7 billion by 2010, a gain of 170% from 2004. Google, which gets more queries than the next four engines combined, had 39% of the search market in November. That's 5 percentage points more than it had during the same period a year earlier, according to comScore Media Metrix. Meanwhile, Yahoo!'s market share slipped 2.5 percentage points to 29.5%.