SOmething else to consider is in relation to what are you comparing and judging the two companies? If you are considering them as search engines then I believe that Google was better overall from a searchers perspective as it generally provided the most up to date websites in its results. However, now when you do a search for many popular search terms. Terms like "credit cards" or "find a flight to the USA" all you see is paid advertisements. Literally 90% of the screen is covered in paid advertisements for those searches. In that instance Googel is just a glorified advertising board and no longer a true search engine. If you are looking at them as a news service then I agree with Pure Avidacr's comments above that Google news offers faster delivery ad more recent updates to the news that it publishes. Do people agree with me?
Well if on traffic point of view and other services then Google is good. I think every search engine has its own importance and plus points, all the search engine provide different services, may be some search engines are in good position in providing some services as compare to competitors like yahoo news are good and Google have more traffic then other search engines. So if some search engine is not good in one service then it may be good in another thing.
Perhaps, but in different things, an example to use email many are both yahoo mail, because in terms of face-to-face more interesting compared with gmail. However, if it were applied in traffic Yahoo is far different to Google, start of the algorithm they use, in general all people prefer using Google instead of Yahoo.
As a search engine Yahoo is not better than Google. Google SERP's are more authenticate and validated. Worldwide people uses Google the most for searching something.