Briefly, as is its wont, fame beckoned for your blogger last week when he did a tour of duty at the BBC to talk about the likely effect of Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo.

There’s no need to go into deep details about that putative transaction here, although, if you’d like to see what I think, you could look here, here, here, here and here. No, what struck me most forcibly was the extent to which search had beaten its old enemy, the portal. At the Beeb, headlines suggested that Microsoft was buying a leading “search engine”. I must admit raising a quizzical eyebrow as it’s a long time since I heard the term used to describe a company.

And yet…

In the mid-1990s I edited a web site that shared office space with Yahoo UK. A manager there berated me for referring to Yahoo as a search engine. No, it was a gateway to the web -- a portal, no less, he insisted.

But the company that differentiated on search quality, Google, has been the winner so far on the internet. Having a string of great properties like Mail, Flickr, Delicious and Finance has helped prop up Yahoo in hits; Microsoft has had the tie-in to a massive brand and OS; but Google’s search has been the most powerful means of making hard cash.

There is a lesson here for all those web sites that don’t deliver the search results you wanted, and even for enterprise search and content management camps. At least for many ways to search and control data, unless you have an excellent core search capability, the other guy probably has a better product.