(FORTUNE Small Business) – Yahoo is the Marlon Brando of Websites. Brando's presence on stage and screen in the early 1950s helped define acting for the rest of the century. In its brilliant youth, Yahoo, the first Web search site, defined the way we use the Web. Unfortunately Brando has spent the past 40-plus years as a bloated parody of himself, chasing money and doing shoddy work. Yahoo, desperate for revenue, seems destined to live out its days just as pathetically, marketing premium business services that deserve your attention about as much as those 52 copies of The Score gathering dust in your local Blockbuster.

Many of Yahoo's new premium services are targeted right at small business: domain names, ad-free business-class e-mail, and Web hosting, among others. (Yahoo does compete with AOL Time Warner, parent of FSB's publisher, but its efforts are much more developed than AOL's.) It also recently surveyed users to see whether they'd be interested in--and what they would pay for--things like Web-based word processing, broadband Net access, and a secure version of instant messenger. Based on my experience, I'd say Yahoo's bid to be your business partner is an offer you can refuse.

This is a company with its eyes on your wallet, not on helping your business. When I log in to my personal Yahoo Mail account, pitches for upgrading to business e-mail sit right alongside ads for Yahoo Personals and fantasy hockey. (Hey, understanding my company's e-mail needs couldn't be much different from solving my desire for a goal-scoring defenseman!)

The lack of professionalism could be forgiven if the business services had any coherence, but the site is like a bad carnival's hall of mirrors. Yahoo has three wholly separate premium services devoted to building and hosting a Website, and two different business e-mail offerings. And none of them acknowledge the existence of the others so that a business could easily compare them and decide what's best. Whichever hole you fall into is the hole you're meant to be in.

Maybe I could let that go if the tools were any good, but--Macaulay Culkin's Home Alone face here--they're not. The Website builder is amateurish, filled with templates more suitable to creating a shrine to your kitty than your business. Yahoo Business Mail forces you to buy a domain name; you can't transfer a preexisting one. It's also BYOISP, and since the ISP you'll need to access Yahoo's mail will give you a comparable e-mail package to use with any domain, you'd be patronizing Yahoo only out of pity, not need.

Then there's Yahoo's penchant for overpromising and underdelivering. One of Yahoo Store's big selling points is the marketing boost you get from a spot in Yahoo Shopping, its online mall. I don't doubt that you can have a successful Yahoo Store, but it won't be from the company's marketing help. Yahoo long ago sold out its small business customers to give prime mall real estate to big retailers. RedWagons.com is one of Yahoo Store's small business success stories. But search for "red wagons" on Yahoo Shopping, and it comes up 16th. Who's No. 1? Major retailer KB Toys. Didn't Yahoo use to be a search site? Gee, I wonder whether Yahoo's corporate portal initiative, building sites for companies like McDonald's at six figures a pop, will get more attention than the proposed online office suite, which may cost $25 a month.

Yahoo is in dire need of a new source of money, but it has yet to prove that it deserves yours.