Thursday, July 30, 2009

Yahoo comes full circle with retreat from search

Yahoo! Tech: "Yahoo Inc. invested billions of dollars in its Internet search engine during the past six years before realizing it made more sense to entrust the job to an outsider — hearkening back to a conclusion the company's co-founders reached shortly after they started their Web directory in the mid-1990s.

The latest shift in direction will put rival Microsoft Corp. in control of the search results and the ads that appear alongside search results on Yahoo's highly trafficked Web site, assuming the proposed partnership is approved by antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe.

The 10-year deal announced Wednesday blows up a search expansion undertaken under Yahoo's former chief executive, Terry Semel, who resigned under shareholder pressure two years ago. The repudiation of Semel's strategy returns Yahoo to a philosophy embraced by co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo in the company's early days."

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