Sunnyvale, California -- Internet search pioneer Yahoo Inc., in a cost-cutting move, is closing down its offices worldwide from Christmas through New Year's Day, except for “essential functions,” its first ever, as the Internet company searching new avenues to cut costs during the recession, reports WSJ.

This is the first time Yahoo has ordered most of its 13,200 employees to utilize vacation time or unpaid leave during the holidays, according to reliable sources. Although it has carried out pretty much similar move last year, but it was for U.S. offices only. The story offers instances of other big tech/media companies in the Valley: both Adobe and Apple have similar closures.

Sunnyvale, California -- Not to be scooped out by its rivals, just days after Google announced its plan for integrating content from sources such as Twitter and blogs in to real-time search, taking advantage of its newly gained access to Twitter's cosmic collection of data, as well as feeds from Facebook, MySpace and others. And now, according to a Yahoo Search blog entry, which was posted later Thursday by team members Ivan Davtchev and Shiv Ramamurthi, Yahoo plans to launch its own feature to integrate relevant tweets of popular, “buzzing” topics into the search results page. The feature will go live later today, as well.

According to reports from Reuters, Yahoo already experimenting with Twitter results in its News search for breaking news and veering topics. Today, it is adding Twitter results to its main search page, which can be viewed in real-time results for every search you do by selecting the Updates option, Bing is also in the real-time race.

Sunnyvale, California -- Yahoo on Monday introduced a new privacy tool planned to give users with additional control over what types of targeted ads they are delivered online. The company's Ad Interest Manager “will show users what interests we think they have, and also let them edit and change those interests to reflect the most up–to-date information,” Yahoo said in a blog post.

Yahoo's Ad Interest Manager, released in beta this week, offers Yahoo consumers a key area where they can look at a list of categories, which includes entertainment, finance, and politics that represents a wide set of interests that inform the types of ads Yahoo serves across its network of sites, inviting users to convey their preferences in each category with on and off buttons.

“Yahoo! is committed to offering consumers with enhanced transparency and control when they are online,” says Yahoo!'s VP of policy and head of privacy, Anne Toth. “Ad Interest Manager will show users what interests we think they have, and also let them edit and change those interests to reflect the most up-to-date information. Importantly, users who do not want interest-based ads can turn them off completely.”

Sunnyvale, California -- Internet pioneer Yahoo Inc. on Wednesday said that it is weaving tighter integration with Facebook that will further open its Internet properties to users of its email, photo-sharing and other online products link their content and activities directly into Facebook, the world's largest social networking service.

The move tightens an alliance recently established when Yahoo home pages began presenting updates from people's friends at the world's most popular online social-networking service.

Yahoo's expanded association with Facebook content is anticipated to begin in the first half of 2010, and will be combined with more of Yahoo's online properties, will enable users to see their Facebook friends' activities on Yahoo and share photos, article comments and other contents directly on the Facebook stream, according to Yahoo vice president of communities Jim Stoneham.

“With this association, we are opening the door for two of the Internet's largest online communities to make it easier for people to stay connected," Stoneham said in a release.

Sunnyvale, California -- As part of Sunnyvale-based Yahoo's strategy to recast the Right Media, the ad exchange that Yahoo acquired in 2007 for a reported $680 million in cash and stock, but on Tuesday the company announced that it will shut down the Direct Media Exchange (DMX) advertising platform, since its founder Michael Walrath recently quited from his job as Yahoo's SVP of Advertising Strategy.

Sunnyvale, California -- Yet another management shuffle at Yahoo. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company has given “David Ko,” formerly senior vice president for Yahoo Mobile, has been awarded to the Internet giant's vast media properties in the U.S. to his portfolio, is now senior vice president of audience division, in a sign that the search provider plans to focus even more on mobile opportunities, the company said.

AllThingsD's Kara Swisher first reported the news earlier today that Ko was the promising candidate to take over as North American Audience head at Yahoo, reporting to U.S. EVP Hilary Schneider.

Sunnyvale, California -- Yahoo Go, a four-year-old mobile application service that connects users to a number of diversified services (including mail, news, and weather), is reportedly getting ready to pull its shutter down on January 12, 2010, the company announced. Yahoo has decided to focus its mobile efforts elsewhere.

Starting the beginning of 2010, Yahoo Go, the mobile application service, introduced in 2006 at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, will be discontinued, though it seems that the company plans on concentrating on the development of applications and services for high-end smartphones, including those based on the Android operating system or the iPhone.

Sunnyvale, California -- In an attempt to improving its own search as it awaits Bing Deal, Yahoo Inc. is geared up to set in motion the pace in the race to provide the best real-time news. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company just made its first step towards making search results more fresh contents from news sources, photos, videos and most importantly Twitter, the company announced Thursday.

Starting today, when you do a search on Yahoo for the any current news stories, you can see a tab for Twitter results that contains related videos and photos published by Twitter users on top of the search results page. For example, if you search for “space shuttle atlantis,” or “obama,” you will get a section for news results, which contains tabs for news, photos, videos, and Twitter.

Sunnyvale, California -- Based on its commencement of the world's most advanced mobile homepage, Yahoo on Thursday unveiled a “Yahoo Mobile en Español,” a Spanish-language mobile homepage that is customized for the specific needs of the U.S. Hispanic subscribers, offering a highly attractive mobile Internet experience and setting a new industry standard, in a move to court the growing US Hispanic population.

This Spanish-language edition of the Yahoo Mobile home page, which is available on more than 1,900 mobile devices, also includes search services, editor-selected content and news updates.

Users can also combine their favorite content and services from across the Internet to build a personally relevant mobile experience, keeping the things they care about at their fingertips, and enhancing their ability to:

Sunnyvale, California -- It is quite apparent that music searches comprise a large number of searches on the web today. To overcome this cumbersome tasks, Google Inc., last week unveiled the Music Onebox -- a special new music search product that allows users stream songs in their entirety for free. But Yahoo has long been a player in music search, and just yesterday Yahoo Video responded by improving its music video search offering and browsing capabilities.

A Yahoo representative explained in an email to WebProNews, “Yahoo! Video Search is introducing an easier way for people to explore their favorite music artists. The new video search music refiner taps into the 'Web of Things' to intelligently present the most popular albums and songs for artist or band queries so you can explore music artists in an intuitive way.”

Sunnyvale, California -- Yahoo Inc, attempting to outwit its rivals in providing up-to-the-minute Internet search results, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company said it is experimenting with a new search feature that delivers results beyond standard search results based on relevant information being shared by Internet users in real-time, the latest move among the biggest search brands to stand apart, according to sources familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

As normally discussed around the search industry circle, real-time search constitutes a difficult undertaking for Yahoo. Google and Facebook have already made their first efforts in this field, and their partner -- Twitter -- has a rather higher profile than Yahoo's pal, OneRiot.

According to WSJ reports appeared earlier, states that Yahoo was partnering with heavily-funded startup OneRiot -- which indexes links users share on Twitter, Digg and other social networking sites -- to power the real-time results.

Sunnyvale, California -- Yahoo continues to push ahead with mobile search distribution deals, despite its search agreement with Microsoft. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company today said that it has signed an exclusive multi-year mobile search deal with German mobile operator O2 Germany; displacing Google to continuing the battle among search providers for placement on mobile phones. O2 will also integrate Yahoo properties into its mobile portal.

More than 15 million Germans should now have something additional Yahoo in their lives. The announcement Monday comes as one that Yahoo made in 2007 with Telefonica, which owns O2. That deal delivered Yahoo search on Telefonica phones in Latin America and O2 in the U.K., but it excluded O2 Germany because that operator had just signed a deal with Google, said Mitch Lazar, managing director of Yahoo Mobile Europe.

Sunnyvale, California -- It seems that Yahoo Mail has suffered a breakdown. Complaints from Yahoo Mail users poured are all over Twitter. It is not clear how extensive the outage is and what is causing the issue but, the Sunnyvale, California company on Monday confirmed a Mail outage that affected a small number of its users, with the service inaccessible for some and spotty for others.

“A small fraction of Yahoo! Mail users may have experienced intermittent email issues earlier today, October 26, but the problem has now been resolved. We believe this was an isolated incident. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused,” a Yahoo spokeswoman said in an e-mail.

According to TechCrunch, which detected a Twitter spike in reports of problems with accessing Yahoo Mail service over the last several hours. Yahoo Mail, which is currently the No. 1 Web mail service with 300 million people using it worldwide, so even a minor outage could result in a large amount of people not having access to their email accounts. Rival Gmail also succumbed to a serious outage recently, leaving users with nearly eight hours of downtime.

Sunnyvale, California -- Continuing to bolster up original programming, Yahoo Inc. on Wednesday signed a deal with media-buying giant WPP's GroupM Entertainment studio to create branded content for the Web portal's key properties including news, sports, finance and entertainment.

Yahoo's agreement with GroupM should yield more original content designed specifically for advertisers, such as celebrity mom blog Spotlight to Nightlight, hosted by Ali Landry (right), shown interviewing Mayim Bialik.

Under the deal, Yahoo and GroupM Entertainment will take part with advertisers to develop a range of creative concepts that represents media content with an advertiser's messaging for each program, which will be displayed on Yahoo media properties like News, Sports, Finance and Entertainment.

Sunnyvale, California -- After three years of stumbling financials, and aggressive cost-cutting moves, the Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo Inc. said that net profit soared more than 244% in the third quarter to 186 million dollars, or 13 cents per share, from 54 million dollars, or four cents per share, a year ago, easily surpassing analysts' forecasts, but revenue dropped by double digits as the company's turnaround strategy failed to lure back advertisers unnerved by the economic downturn, as the Internet company reported its third quarter results on Tuesday.

Yahoo Inc outwitted Wall Street's expectations as spending by advertisers showed signs of life in the third quarter and as months of cost-cutting and restructuring boosted the Internet company's bottom line.

Sunnyvale, California -- Yahoo Inc. has reportedly settled a class action lawsuit over pay-per-click ads with some of its search advertising customers who were not satisfied about where their ads were showing up sold by Yahoo that wound up in some shady corners of the Internet.

Yahoo has agreed to reimburse with some search marketers refunds of $20 to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that it served search ads on typosquatting sites, parked domains and other potentially low-quality locales.

“Yahoo! breached its contract with its customers by allowing Yahoo! ads to be displayed in spyware, domain name parking sites (also known as bulk registration sites), pop-ups, pop-unders, and typosquatting sites. Plaintiffs brought claims for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, misrepresentation, civil conspiracy, and unfair business practices.”

Sunnyvale, California -- Yahoo has been persistently pulling down many of its underperforming services and products for a while now and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. The internet pioneer has released a “final notice” on Wednesday reminding GeoCities users that the free site creation service will be closing up shop later this month.

If you happen to be closely knitted to the Internet since its early days, then chances are high that you certainly might have discovered at least one whacky Geocities' hosted website. Back in the proverbial day, GeoCities was the place where many a modern-day internet nerd cut his or her teeth. Few though have such a history and significance behind them as GeoCities, the free website hosting service that Yahoo acquired ten years ago for $3.65 billion and which will close down completely on October 26.

Sunnyvale, California -- Yahoo Inc which acquired Xoopit, a startup for $20 million in July this year, announced just last week that it will discontinue support for a popular Gmail plug-in with Xoopit, but said it would continue support for open accounts. Xoopit, which combines media files from users' Gmail accounts, has now been integrated into Yahoo's own Web mail service.

Yahoo notified via an email to Xoopit users on Gmail tilted, “Xoopit for Gmail is closing. Here is the info you will need.” It details different ways users can export their files, photos, videos, and other attachments which may be stored on the service. From the email:

Users of Xoopit will have until November 13, 2009, to backup any media stored on Yahoo's servers, after which it will no longer be available. However, the company will continue to retain any data until next February in accordance with its 90-day retention policy. Doing this is necessary only for users who have deleted the source file from their Gmail account, as Xoopit simply copies over the media, leaving the version on Google's servers intact.

Sunnyvale, California -- With mobile search growing astronomically, it is no surprise that big search engines vying to monetize the traffic. Yahoo today announced that it has “fine-tuned” their sponsored search ads so they can now be served on iPhones, iPod Touch and Android mobile phones.

“With this tweak, standard Sponsored Search ads (40-character header, 70-character description, the host URL--you know the drill) will appear on these mobile devices, giving your ads wider appeal and more relevancy to people on the go -- potential customers searching for your offerings, whether you are offering dry cleaning or a dry martini,” says Yahoo's Search Marketing Team.

Advertisers do not have to do anything extra, adds will begin appearing immediately on these devices for relevant searches. They can still target mobile users specifically using Yahoo Mobile Sponsored Search, however.

Sunnyvale, California -- Internet pioneer Yahoo Inc., on Tuesday announced that it is integrating its Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP) with the recently renewed Yahoo! Homepage, which allows advertisers and publishers develop apps for the homepage is part of the company's ambitious Yahoo Open Strategy (YOS).

The Yahoo Developer Network blog released a post calling for “innovative and flawless” applications to be submitted for inclusion in a gallery section on their redesigned homepage. “In support of the Yahoo! Open Strategy, this integration offers a more customizable and personally relevant experience for over 118 million monthly homepage users across the U.S.,” a Yahoo! spokesperson said in a statement. Yahoo said it gets over 330 million unique visitors per month worldwide.