Yahoo reaffirms commitment to search

Not conceding defeat to Google, executives stress

Tom Sanders in California, vnunet.com 26 Jan 2006

Yahoo is still very much committed to search, the company said in response to a media report claiming that the company had conceded the search battle to Google.

Two company executives emphasised in a posting on the Yahoo Search Blog that they considered the battle far from over. "We are still in the early days of search. We're in it for the long haul, and we're in it to win," they wrote.

The posting was signed by Qi Lu, vice president for search engineering at Yahoo, and Eckart Walther, vice president for search products.

Yahoo was forced to respond after the Bloomberg press agency published a news story that quoted Yahoo chief financial officer Susan Decker as saying: "We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google.

"It's not our goal to be the number one in internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."

The article was quickly picked up by bloggers under headlines suggesting that Yahoo has stopped trying to compete with Google.

The executives insisted that this was "speculation and confusion" and pointed out that it is directly contradicted by recent Yahoo actions.

The internet portal launched its own search engine in February 2004, swapping out search technology provided by Google, and keeps investing in the technology.

Lu and Walther also talked up Yahoo projects and acquisitions including Flickr, del.icio.us and My Web as proof that the company is continuing to innovate and help users access information through other ways than web searches.

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