I think it’s time that the Web giants of the West clean house and toss away what they don’t absolutely need to accomplish goals set by management. Why? Technological focus of the highly productive sort has given way to competitive hubris, and those two terms should remain exclusive from one another often as possible. Each of the Big Four - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL - has displayed terrible redundancies in their own way, and needlessly so.

One of the most outstanding examples, perhaps, comes by way of Google. Google purchased YouTube some years aback, and its acquisition, while still not especially profitable, has come to dominate the field of Web video much the same way the company’s own search-advertising duopoly has grown. Still, Google Video survives. To be sure, they each serve different purposes. But why is that, exactly? Why work an ancillary angle? Wouldn’t it have been better to do away with Google Video by now and attend solely to YouTube?

Also, Google purchased Jaiku, a one-time strong competitor to Twitter that promoted itself heavily for the mobile crowd to great effect, but lost considerable ground in the last year do to the ways of popularity contest. What was the reasoning behind Google’s purchase? To get on the microblog wagon, of course. Yet, if the intention was good, Jaiku nonetheless gained little for its parent. So wouldn’t it be best to just…move on? Jaiku’s homepage signifies its status well at present. The announcement of Jaiku’s move into the Googleplex is still write large. Still.

Now, how about the smallest of the four, AOL. Seems innocent enough, trying to make things happen for itself. But perhaps it’s trying too many things, no? From the looks of it, AOL has only a few really solid efforts underway: its AIM service, its radio (plus Last.fm) projects, and its blogging network. Those are what make AOL sit unique from other giants, it seems, and which should be developed with vigor. Everything else appears ancillary. AOL Mail is still strong as far as users go, but in utility, it’s no market leader. Search? Three words: “Enhanced by Google.” Sure, its search and home news page are very much bread and butter to the entire operation, but again, AOL can’t survive forever on aid. It needs to find its own way. It should think less horizontal and more vertical. How best to make its most attractive properties better, in other words.

Microsoft is at this time a peculiar fellow. It has a reasonable amount of traffic, but its ambition may be too much of a fantasy. Google is very dominant in search, and while Microsoft would do well to remain in the game in order to pull in some coin to fund its Live services, to seek a real challenge with the king of the judge seems somewhat fantastical at the moment. Microsoft was hard after Yahoo, but for $44+ billion dollars, it might be better able to condition its own properties to serve users better. And that suite of full-fledged cloud office applications isn’t going to make itself. My last word about Microsoft for now: The company’s expansion of its original deal with Facebook to supply a search box for users something that I think is worth more to Microsoft’s future than doing anything really massive with Yahoo.

Speaking of Yahoo, it is one player that is so unfortunately confused about its plans for the future that it hasn’t yet managed to make an outright killing with its top properties. From far and wide, cries over the unrealized potential of Flickr have droned on and on and on again. Yahoo Mail, besides being visually refreshed, has remained largely unchanged. Yahoo Buzz, something which many consider to have a clear advantage over Digg, if only for its potential audience, is not displayed with any prominence on the Yahoo homepage. The user must select “More Yahoo Services” in order to gain access. For something which can make Yahoo seem more current and appear more content-rich from the get-go, it’s strangely second-tier. For goodness sake, Yahoo still features a link for GeoCities at its topmost domain. Poor prioritization for sure.

Here’s the thing. The roles of Internet giants are understandably difficult to manage. The carnal objective of enormous financial growth, mandated by the companies as well as the starseekers of Wall Street, is a massively tough nut to crack in and of itself, quarter after quarter. Brilliance is hard to repeat, after all, and sometimes there is only so much you can eek out of a particular business. The risk of having a decision deemed stupid and ineffectual by users and subsequently investors as well, is just added pressure that can only be conducive to cautiousness, and not meaningful progress.

Of course, being a giant also has its outstanding benefits. It means that you carry with your name a sizable amount of money, either in assets or in cold hard cash. Which you can experiment with very liberally, particularly in the startup market. But having the option to do so doesn’t necessarily mean you take it.

For a long time I’ve watched the Big Four mozy about and stretch themselves unnecessarily. I’ve seen things boom, bust, and languish to various degrees of boring. Sites and services launched afresh or have been purchased, and something or other has subsequently stagnated as a result. Yet all too often have those burdens been kept afloat. Why that is is a mystery. There’s no reason for it. They’re dead weight, and the sooner one is done with them the better. You have lower amount of vital statistics to watch over, giving you more opportunity to zero in on what really matters to their brands.

The fact is that excess fat is on everyone’s plate, and the more able one becomes at mimimizing one’s weaknesses, the more pronounced one’s strengths may grow. Really, sometimes it is that simple.

It didn’t take very long for Google-Yahoo dealings in the form of a search advertising trial partnership to appear to US Department of Justice like a great big juicy red flag. The two giants looked to be all but asking for some good old anti-trust scrutiny and speculation. The attention has only been compounded by their cozy moment last month, when the two Web giants started to hold hands while Yahoo was very much in the process of fending off stubborn advances by Microsoft for a buyout. Of course, as we’ve all been made well aware, Microsoft withdrew its bid. Yet Google is still quite interested in continue to talk with Yahoo, as our own Stan Schroeder explained earlier this week.

Perhaps they continue to converse about the possibility of some kind of extension to brief rendezvous because it did in fact turned out quite good for them both. Good for Google, because, well, it’s another big, lucrative deal for Mountain View to milk with greedy abandon, and good for Yahoo because shareholders expect to see better numbers to justify the company’s stubborn refusal of a purchase, and it seemingly delivered, albeit temporarily. (And hey, let’s face it, it’ll certainly take more than a week or two to offer a real semblance of substantive growth - above and beyond what Yahoo has been able to accomplish all its own with its lackluster Panama framework.)

Be that as it may, the number of parties looking at the potential for more business between Google and Yahoo now involve entities far beyond the DOJ and various pro-competition pundits. Strangely so, even. According to the AP, “a coalition of 16 civil rights and rural advocacy groups, including the Black Leadership Forum and the League of Rural Voters…urged federal regulators to investigate the potential combination.” Even the American Corn Growers’ Association signed the collective request for an investigation if Google and Yahoo are to propose some type of joint venture. Which is just…wow. The folks working the high-fructose, corn-on-cob, and ethanol angles are suspicious of Google-Yahoo ties. That must say something. I don’t know what, precisely. But it can’t be good.

Yahoo is certainly in a peculiar place at the moment. It has not seen its stock price plummet following Microsoft’s abandonment of its bid, as many suspected it would, including myself. (Going into the weekend, it sits a few cents shy of $26, which is roughly $7 more than where it lay prior to Microsoft’s glorious $44.6B public offer.) But that may hinge on a deal with Google. Which, given anti-competitive concerns, likely wouldn’t be granted by regulators.

Unsurprisingly, although the elephant from Redmond is out of the room , Google would still like to nab that advertising deal with Yahoo. According to BBC, comments that Google co-founder Sergey Brin and chief exec Eric Schmidt made before Google’s annual general meeting on Thursday make this quite clear.

“We have been talking to Yahoo and we are very excited to be working with them. We share a lot of values with them,” said Brin. Schmidt pointed out that the two week trial with Yahoo had been a success, saying that it’s a “good basis to talk to Yahoo some more”

Now, imagine that the Microsoft thing had never happened: what were the chances of Yahoo embracing an ad deal with Google just out of the blue? You guessed it right, none. Bloggers and analysts, including me, struggled to find metaphors to describe Yahoo’s possible deal with Google, but they pretty much all agreed that it’s an intentional step backwards for Yahoo aimed solely to thwart Microsoft’s offer.

Yahoo cannot, however, merely shrug off the deal now, otherwise it would be too obvious that they weren’t serious about it, and next time (if there is a next time) Microsoft might not take the bait. Switching to a small scale deal that focuses on one tiny part of Yahoo’s business is a likely exit from this conundrum; in any case, it’ll be interesting to see how Yahoo will wiggle out of this one.