Yahoo! has definitely been the most active player this week and, as far as their announcements are concerned, I’d label one of them as “entertaining”, yet two as “quite interesting”.

I have found their optimism this week to be extremely entertaining since, let’s face it: given the current state of the US economy, one cannot help but be amused when a billion dollar company in their situation claims to be able to double their cash flow in as little as three years. Being optimistic is one thing, but given the current circumstances, their claims are not exactly what one would call realistic.

This week, usability guru Jakob Nielsen asks: “How difficult is it to perform a search on Google?”

No, really. How hard is it? We know the search box in the upper right hand corner of your screen can get there. We know that Google.com in the address bar can get there. But, sadly, Nielsen’s study indicated that at least 24% of Internet users don’t know that. It hurts me just to type it.

A quarter of Internet users said they wanted to search Google for something, but when placed in front of a computer, couldn’t figure it out. “Instead, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine — usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.”