At the All Things Digital D7 conference, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz defended the ailing search giant and suggested that it still outperforms Google in key areas.
"They're very good in search, very good in maps", said Bartz, as reported by ATD. "But they don't have the positioning and reach that we have."
"Google is a place people go to to search. We are a place people come to be informed. We want to be more personal than Google." Yahoo currently accounts for about 20 per cent of internet searches.
Does Ballmer have a boatload?
Bartz also indicated that Yahoo was still willing to part with its search business, if Microsoft could come with up "boatloads of money and the right technology. They'd have to have biiiiig boatloads of money, though".
Talks between the two companies are apparently still going on, but just "a little bit", which would seem to stifle speculation that Microsoft's update of LiveSearch, probably to be called Bing and possibly to be unveiled at the same D7 conference, is actually a re-branded Yahoo search.
Yahoo is intending to chase the burgeoning hyper-local market with "revelant contextual information about things users care about. People should see their high school game Flip videos on Yahoo sports."
In the future, Bartz would like to streamline Yahoo's key properties - like a home page that has 33 code bases and in-fighting between Sports and Finance - in a race to encourage innovation and, ulimately, make "make mobile as compelling as the PC screen".
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Via All Things Digital.
