Wow
"He said looking at a page of search results was an anachronism, put too much onus on the user and was accompanied by extremely ugly advertising."
Too much onus on the user. to click the result they want?
Are you kidding me?
Next they'll be shoving the result I want into my own face without asking, and calling it "intuitive human neurone search picking technology", but it won't be. It'll be one of their sponsored links.
Ugly advertising?
Better take a look at yer own search results pages mate. Last time I looked (2002 or there abouts) it was crammed with nasty animated/Flash banner ads.
Actually just checked now and it appears to look identical to Google results, although with a bit more cruft round the top and bottom.
The problem Yahoo has, is that it has all these different services but no integration.
Flickr is excellent, but it was already excellent before Yahoo bought it years ago.
Yahoo Groups was big for a year or so but now's just full of spam... they could have pre-killed facebook/myspace with that and must have decided not to.
Yahoo Mail/Calendar is borrowing big-style from the (most excellent, actually) Zimbra project.
There's only 1 solution... Geocities 2.0 and Yahoo Auctions mash-ups! Oh no...