If I were to ask 100 people on the street what business Google is in, I bet most of them would say "search". If I asked the same 100 people what business Yahoo is in, I bet they would say "search". They'd be wrong on both counts.

Google is first and foremost an ad company, with 97% of its revenue coming from advertising. Yahoo has, more or less, always been in the content business. It has recently begun portraying itself as a "news organization," but there is some question about how far it intends to go with original news.

Through its early days as a directory of links (which is still around); its ultra-high traffic Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance sites; Yahoo Mail and Yahoo IM communications platforms; or new projects like the Yahoo live videocasting service or the Digg-like Yahoo! Buzz -- the company has always offered readers an abundance of information both onsite and offsite. Much of it is licensed, non-original content. The company has syndication deals with a number of news organizations including the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France Presse, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, and many more. As a result of these deals, Yahoo keeps a huge number of readers within the Yahoo family of sites, rather than redirecting them back to individual news websites.

In the same vein, Yahoo licenses a wide variety of financial information to keep users within the Yahoo! Finance site, rather than redirecting to partner sites like Google Finance does. Yahoo also licenses sports scores, TV listings, and movie reviews and showtimes -- all done so the company can keep users on-site, and generating a truly staggering number of page views.

Google, on the other hand, barely generate any original content, excepting the occasional Google corporate blog post and only licenses content from a few sources, mostly for its News and Finance sites. Google runs its ads next to scraped (search engine and, mostly, Google News) or user-uploaded/generated content (Blogger/YouTube). As a result, the company has gotten in legal hot water several times over what Google claims is its fair use right to reuse otherwise copyrighted information. These cases have been decided, for the most part, in Google's favor.

So, Google runs advertising against other people's content -- that it doesn't pay for. Yahoo runs ads (less effectively, natch) against other people's content -- that it does pay for. But, not always. Yahoo is trying to pick up the ball as a content company, once again. Yahoo interviewed South Korean president Lee Myung-bak and worked with Politico to run a pair of exclusive internet-only interviews with George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice. Yahoo and Politico also paired up for coverage of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

How does Yahoo get these "exclusives"? Simply put, the company reaches more readers than just about any other content provider. "We get these interviews because we have this global audience of 500 million viewers," director of editorial programming Jessica Barron told the AFP. "Yahoo News is a news organization."

Really? If syndicating AP stories makes you a news organization, OK -- but I don't see Yahoo moving extensively into content creation. The company's limited resources are much better spent doing what Ms. Barron suggested: utilizing the company's global reach to grab super-high profile one-offs that it can promote heavily across the network, generating massive traffic and media coverage.

Yahoo needs to focus on things like this that it does well: generating massive traffic and reaching a huge number of users instead of trying to force things that it does less well, like search. The company's much publicized search-ad deal with Google is a good start, as are new ventures like Yahoo Buzz that hugely leverage Yahoo's massive front page traffic with the potential for stories to get promoted there.

I wouldn't be