The differences in audience for the two largest Internet companies fighting for online search supremacy came as a shocker. Hiwise released some data that proved that Yahoo! draws the younger audience, while Google is most visited by older and more wealthy people, no discrimination intended.

Although some might consider this to be highly disturbing, please take note that Yahoo! is still the number one online traffic destination, due to its portal, clearly overpowering the search engine only Google homepage. The graph on the left, provided by Hitwise, explains how much money the social categories are spending online: "Visits by MOSAIC Group to Search.Yahoo.com are plotted on the y-axis and to Google.com on the x-axis. For example, the top left hand box indicates unique strengths for Yahoo! Search, in that they are groups that are over-indexed relative to the online population on Yahoo! Search but under-indexed on Google.com. The bigger the bubble the higher the propensity to have spent $500 online (based on offline data collected by Experian)," Heather Hopkins, VP Research, explains it.

The rough bottom line of the whole graph is that based on precedents, the groups over-indexed on Google.com are most likely to be big online spenders. While Yahoo! settles for the Struggling Societies, Google is pretty contemptuous with the Affluent Suburbia, that's the big difference. Microsoft knows this and it wants Yahoo! more than ever just because it wants a destination that would link to it, sort of a 'while you're here'. The Redmond based company wants the young, Google just wants ads being clicked and successful advertising campaigns. While it's not difficult to see why, the very purpose of this research cannot but have some discriminatory feel about it.

There's no spin off it, it's clear as crystal: Google is emerging to be a more professional tool while Yahoo! is just a destination for everybody. And surprisingly, 'everybody' means less than 'some' in this case.