YAHOO REVS ITS SEARCH ENGINE

The report estimates the firm’s share of "the active Internet population" at 29%, which is, like, a lot, we think. MSN and AOL.com enjoyed the second and third spots, respectively.

What’s more, Nielsen/NetRatings places a number of specialized Yahoo! areas at the tops of their respective categories, notably Yahoo! Music, now known as Launch—which enjoys a 2-1 advantage over its nearest rival in terms of the amount of time users spent checking out its wares. Visitors spent nearly 23 minutes on average on Launch, an eternity in the surf-happy online world.

Of course, hitsdailydouble.com visitors have been known to spend as long as five hours on the site, but only because they’ve consumed too much corn liquor and passed out.

Yahoo! Movies moved to the top of its ratings category, and Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Games, Yahoo! Geocities and My Yahoo! sat at the pinnacles of their respective genres.

"Along with Yahoo! Search, the company’s strong vertical offerings connect consumers to products in shopping, to information on travel and everything in between. The true value consumers take from Yahoo! is through the rich options available to them across our entire search platform. Search is simply the starting point," declaimed SVP of Listings Elizabeth Blair. "Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go pay off another yodeler."

And if you’ll excuse us, we have to make a "vertical offering" of a No. 2 pencil to the ceiling.