Deal to take full control of Web sites valued at $500 million
Yahoo Inc. said it will buy the shares of its local portals in three European countries and South Korea that it does not already own for about $500 million, taking complete ownership of the Web sites.

The company said it reached a deal with Softbank Holdings Ltd. to purchase 30 percent stake in Yahoo U.K., Yahoo Germany and Yahoo France. It also said it would also buy a 33 percent stake in Yahoo Korea from Softbank Corp., Softbank Korea Corp. and Yahoo Japan Corp.

The entrepreneur who runs Yahoo Inc.'s China-based Web portal has announced a new strategy based on promoting the site as a search engine, saying he is ready to spend heavily in a battle with Chinese-language search leader Baidu.com.

Ma Yun, chairman and chief executive officer of Alibaba.com, said the top priority for Yahoo in China is to build the best search engine for the Chinese community instead of an Internet portal like NASDAQ-listed Sina Corp and Sohu.com.

In a major overhaul, Yahoo has significantly upgraded its Maps offering with cleaner maps and integrated local search results.

The Sunnyvale-based company in a latest move unveiled its latest mapping improvements, less than a month after Google upgraded its maps service. Yahoo's service will be available on a test basis at http://maps.yahoo.com/beta.

Rather than starting with a text-based form that asks you to enter a location, the new interface is much more visual, featuring a map of your default location when you start using the service.

Barely a pebble off Yahoo!'s cash mountain?
Yahoo recently announced it has acquired a small UK company called Whereonearth to help improve its local search and mobile phone services and compete more effectively with search leader Google.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Privately-held Whereonearth, which has about 25 employees, has had a limited licensing deal with Yahoo since 2000.

Yahoo and BellSouth are joining forces to sell high-speed Internet access, the latest step in a mating dance that has now united the owner of the Web's most popular destination with the three largest US regional phone companies.

Like the other regional Bells with similar deals, BellSouth wants to tap into Yahoo's vast content to prevent its Internet service from turning into a faceless utility.

Yahoo Inc. is considering buying a stake in America Online Inc., joining other Internet powerhouses interested in the company's Web portal. However, unlike its smaller rival, antitrust regulators would likely review such a deal more carefully, as it would combine the two largest properties on the Web today.

The discussions were described as preliminary and not as advanced as separate talks AOL parent Time Warner Inc. has had with Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc., which is considering a joint bid with Comcast Corp.

Yahoo introduces new multimedia search service called Yammy
Yahoo! Korea yesterday launched its multimedia search service "Yammy," vowing to recapture a leading position in the local search engine competition.

Yammy is the only Korean portal that can search all video files on the World Wide Web, said Seong Nak-yang, chief operating officer of Yahoo! Korea, at a press conference in Seoul. Yammy has also been made easy for the amateur user to upload his or her video contents by supporting a wide range of file formats, such as AVI, ASF and MPG.

Blogs vie with News for Eyeballs
Bloggers are gaining a higher profile alongside traditional news sources with Yahoo including blogs in its expanding news search system.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company, Yahoo! News searches are now delivering blogs as well as web pages in their search results - - an experiment that figures to test the public's appetite for information from alternative sources.

Under Yahoo's new approach, a keyword search for online news will include a list of relevant Web logs, or ‘blogs,’ displayed in a box to the right of the results collected from mainstream journalism.