CNET News took a fresh look at Yahoo's search results Thursday by Hitwise Intelligence and raises the question of whether Yahoo could survive "just fine" without its search engine.

Heather Hopkins, vice president of research for Hitwise, wrote in a blog entry that Yahoo's valuable sites would not necessarily fair poorly without Yahoo's search engine, the report said. To figure this out, she took the top 20 Yahoo properties and ranked them based on user traffic. (Yahoo Mail and the main Yahoo home page came way out on top with 37.5 percent and 30 percent, respectively.)

She then compared how they're each getting their traffic on the Web, and found that 14 of the 20 Yahoo sites get more traffic from Google than they do from Yahoo—even the top Yahoo Mail and Yahoo home page sites.