Sunnyvale, California — Yahoo Inc, which recently announced a landmark Web search deal with Microsoft Corp., is riveting its attention on developing into its display ad, content and mobile services technology, its chief executive Carol Bartz told the New York Times in an interview.
Bartz said that they took the decision because Yahoo simply does not have ample resources to enhance and match the level of its search services to that of Google and Microsoft were making in the search business.
“My first reaction when I got here was that I would not even do a search deal,” Bartz quoted by the paper, “until I looked at our expense structure and our actual options and looked at what our prime job was, which is to grow audience.”
Yahoo’s Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Labs, said that the company could actually “mine” messages from Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, to offer Web surfers search results beyond those offered by Microsoft’s Bing.
Bing is the Microsoft search engine that is to provide Yahoo’s standard search results, under the terms of a long-awaited partnership announced this week.
“I’ve always believed that the interesting thing about Tweets is not particularly searching them but mining them. So we could mine them in real-time, then piece them together what we mine into the search engine,” said Raghavan in an interview with Reuters on Friday.
Now that the company has outsourced its search engine technology, the company would now focus on other core areas. However, Bartz told the paper that the core of the company was intact. “We have not devitalized the company.”
Yahoo said that the company has relieved up resources and funds that would be utilized to expand into display ads market along with content generation and mobile services.
Yahoo and Microsoft entered in to a 10-year search deal last week under which Microsoft will power search queries on Yahoo’s sites and Yahoo’s sales force will be responsible for selling premium search ads to big buyers for both companies.
The move will allow Yahoo to save some $425 million in operating expenses, the company said.