It must be Yahoo!’s week to get slammed. Last week was Technorati and the weeks before that saw Google and MSN face the gauntlet. And now, as everybody else is whirling accusations of phishing and stolen bandwidth, Business Week Online pounds the other Yahoo! kidney over site design.

“[D]esign gurus and former Yahoo insiders interviewed by BusinessWeek all say the same thing: Yahoo.com remains cluttered and scattershot, almost schizophrenicIs it a media company, a services company, or a search company?” writes Sarah Lacy.

The article muses about the importance of effective site design for building and retaining users and, quoting several former Yahoo! employees and industry professionals, is highly critical of the 2nd most popular search engine and arguably the most visited portal on the web. The tone is of a vein that paints the picture of a struggling Internet entity desperately trying to define itself.

The quotes seem extra carefully selected to convey that message, and stingingly contradicts the numbers and what many predict for Yahoo!’s future.

“It lacks focus and, surprisingly for a company named Yahoo, it lacks personality. It’s a page that wants to be so many things that in the end, it ends up being nothing,’ says Jesse James Garrett, director of user experience strategy at design firm Adaptive Path in San Francisco.

On the Internet, it seems that there are three emerging strategies: Do one thing and do it well; Do everything and do it well; Do one thing and do it well and then wait for a company that does everything to buy you.

And it hardly seems that Yahoo!, at this point, has to prove anything. It is a media company. It is a services company. It is a search company. And it does all of those things quite well. Billions of dollars, millions of users, billions of search queries, strong year after strong year are hardly symptoms of a company that doesn’t know who it is or where it’s going. And for a site that lacks personality, an awful lot of people seem to like it.