• GigaOm, Thursday, July 17, 2008 11 AM

The battle over Yahoo's search business as witnessed over the last few days seems both ridiculous and petty. And it takes the attention away from what is Yahoo's true value: a media aggregation platform. Yahoo is the place a lot of people -- some 400 million -- visit to get their news, sports scores and email.

GigaOm's Om Malik describes the battle over Yahoo's search business as both "ridiculous and petty," saying that all the focus is taking attention away from Yahoo's biggest and best asset: its media aggregation platform. Some 400 million people visit Yahoo sites to get category-specific news and check their email. As Malik says, "I have always liked that business, and yesterday I experienced, first-hand, the enormous strength of Yahoo."

A story from WebWorkerDaily, part of GigaOm's blog network, got voted up to the Yahoo home page last night thanks to the Web giant's new voting service, Yahoo Buzz, which Malik describes as "a service akin to Digg, except much more powerful." Within a few hours, the story, which was about what to expect when switching from a BlackBerry to an iPhone, was viewed more than 200,000 times, attracting 350-plus comments-showing both big time traffic and big time engagement. The story received a much bigger boost from Buzz than it would have from the likes of Digg and StumbleUpon.

It's this massive audience that's Yahoo's core business, Malik says. Rather than competing with Google, Yahoo should be focused on finding new ways to grow its massive aggregated user base and leverage its existing one.

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