My Google is Bigger than Your Yahoo

(Edited) At US$600, is Google better than Yahoo? The BBC said today that there are 37B Google searches v. 8.5B Yahoos and as Marketwatch pointed out:

in terms of valuation, Google appears to maintain a sharp discount to the lower-priced Yahoo.

At $600, Google shares are trading at a little more than 30 times estimated earnings for 2008, according to consensus forecasts from Thomson Financial.

Is there any doubt as to why (at the time of this post) GOOG is at US$625.39 and YHOO is trading at US$28.36?

Which also begs the question as to why in the Philippine Capital of Manila, Yahoo is first place Filipinos go to at 90% as opposed to 60% for Google? The article talks about the most affluent of Filipinos when it quotes:

“More than half of them would go online everyday for email, chat, or downloading music,” said Jerico Barrera, Nielsen associate director, presenting the study's findings.

Forgive me--- that is so Age of Napster and very 20th century. In a capital city like Manila that sees the Internet just as a source of leisure and that browsing the web is 2nd only to television, I'm not at all surprised that king Yahoo and not very friendly Friendster are the first pages casual and first time Internet users in Manila visit. Both "cultures" of Yahoo and Friendster jibe with Filipinos and that is saddening. Then again, people got to start somewhere.