Yahoo Japan to switch to Google's search engine

Yahoo Japan, Japan's largest Internet portal operator, will adopt Google's search engine, refusing to follow Yahoo Inc in choosing Microsoft as a partner.

Yahoo Japan, which currently uses Yahoo Inc's search technology, and Google together would control almost all of the search market in the word's second-biggest economy.

The deal stands in stark contrast to the decision by Yahoo Inc, which owns roughly one-third of Yahoo Japan, to integrate its search technology with Microsoft after the U.S. government blocked a tie-up with Google.

Yahoo Japan, which hopes the deal will strengthen its No. 1 position in the domestic market, will also adopt Google's search-linked advertisement delivery system and feed its data to Google sites.

The deal was seen by some as underscoring Microsoft's weaker position in search. Microsoft said the deal would hand the whole search market to Google and stifle competition.

"If this Yahoo Japan and Google partnership works well, other search engine and portal site players all over the world may start adopting Google's technology," said Mitsushige Akino, chief fund manger at Ichiyoshi Investment Management.

At a news conference, Yahoo Japan President Masahiro Inoue said the Japanese company concluded after a thorough investigation that Microsoft's search technology was not strong enough for its needs, citing Japanese language search capabilities as one example.

Yahoo Japan shares gained 1.2 percent on reports of an imminent deal, while the broader market was flat. The announcement came after the close of trading hours.

Yahoo Japan said in a statement Yahoo Inc will remain a strategic partner for the Japanese portal site and the U.S. company will maintain its stake. Yahoo Japan will still use the Yahoo brand.

The Japanese company also said it has confirmed with the Japanese government that the partnership with Google will not violate antitrust regulations.

Yahoo Inc, Yahoo Japan's second-biggest shareholder after Softbank Corp, signed a 10-year deal with Microsoft last year to save hundreds of millions of dollars a year in expenses by shifting Web indexing chores to Microsoft while Yahoo focuses on improving searching.

Yahoo Inc executives have said the company expects to complete the search technology integration in all 59 countries in which it operates by the second quarter of 2012.

Microsoft railed against the Yahoo-Google tie-up in Japan on Tuesday, but stopped short of saying it would challenge it legally.

"This agreement is even more anti-competitive than Google's deal with Yahoo in the United States and Canada that the Department of Justice found to be illegal," said Microsoft's general counsel in a statement.

"(That) deal would have locked up 90 percent of paid search advertising. This deal gives Google virtually 100 percent of all searches in Japan, both paid and unpaid. It means there will be no search competition in Japan and that Google will end up controlling all personal search information for all Japanese consumers and businesses."

Source: Reuters

Yahoo profit up 50 p.c., revenue falls short

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Yahoo Inc missed Wall Street's revenue estimates in the second quarter as some customers unexpectedly cut spending on online display ads toward the end of June, and shares fell more than 6 per cent.

Yahoo's profits rose by more than 50 per cent to $213.3 million, while the revenue in the three months ending 30 June was $1.6 bn compared with $1.57 billion in the year-ago quarter. However, its net revenue, which excludes the revenue it shares with website partners, was $1.13 billion.

The lower-than-expected revenue, which came even as Yahoo continued to improve its profit margins, raised fresh concerns about Yahoo's efforts to increase revenue growth, and about the health of the online advertising market that Yahoo depends on.

"Display (advertising) is brand driven and everyone is tight with their budgets," said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis.

"Any talk of slowing is going to spook investors," he said.

But he noted that Yahoo's challenges in display advertising are also due to competition from online advertising exchanges, including Yahoo-owned RightMedia, which offer marketers less expensive ways to reach consumers on the Web.

Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz said on a conference call on Tuesday that the company's "top job" was growing revenue, and said that Yahoo continued to make progress adding video and social networking to its network of websites in order to make them more popular with websurfers.

She also said Yahoo's Internet search deal with Microsoft Corp, designed to save Yahoo hundreds of millions of dollars in annual expenses by shifting back-end Web indexing chores to Microsoft, remains on track to go into effect before year's end.

Revenue from search on Yahoo's web sites in the second quarter declined 8 percent year-on-year, with executives noting that Yahoo did not see as much of "a pickup in monetizable" searches as it had expected.

Last week, Google Inc, the world's No.1 search engine, reported a 24 per cent increase in second-quarter revenue, though the company's increased spending caused the company to miss Wall Street's earnings per share estimates.

Yahoo ranks among the world's most popular web services, with more than 600 million users of its flagship web site, email and other products, according to the company. But the Internet pioneer's growth has stalled amid competition from Web search giant Google and a new crop of social networking sites like Facebook.

Yahoo said its revenue in the three months ending June 30 rose to $1.60 billion from $1.57 billion in the year-earlier period.

But Yahoo's net revenue, which excludes revenue it shares with website partners, was $1.13 billion -- below the average analyst expectation of $1.16 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.