Ben Hammersley has a piece in today’s Guardian arguing that Yahoo is catching up with Google. Hmmm… Much as I like Ben, his reasoning — though provocative — seems a bit thin. “Google’s reputation comes from three things”, he writes, “the quality of its search results, the cutting-edge research and prototypes it produces, and the interfaces it provides for other programs to tap into, known as their application program interface (API).” Ben glosses over the first while praising Yahoo’s new research team and its now-released API. I’ll take his word on the API, but the research effort seems pretty flimsy. And the search results still aren’t anything like as good. We all agree that Google needs competition to keep it sharp, but I honestly don’t see Yahoo as providing it yet.