Yahoo renews vow to fight Microsoft

Yahoo showed on Monday that it intends to keep fighting Microsoft on multiple fronts, demonstrating an array of improvements in the way it presents search results and other offerings.

The long-time rivals announced an alliance last month designed to keep them within sight of Google, the internet search leader. But that deal is confined to search, and Yahoo’s comments made clear the Microsoft tie-up leaves room for antagonism even there.

Much of Yahoo’s upgrade resembles innovations in Microsoft’s recently revamped Bing search engine.

But that is because the changes are immediately logical, not because of the technology deal awaiting clearance by antitrust regulators. Microsoft intends to give Yahoo the algorithm-driven list of websites mentioning user-supplied words, which has been the core of the search experience, while the companies compete on what else the user sees.

Microsoft will distribute most ads accompanying search results, while Yahoo handles
in-person sales to large accounts. For each company, showing ads to more people nets more money.

The version of Yahoo Search in testing de-emphasises automatically generated results and summarises many results by type in a new panel. A search for a person, for example, typically pulls out useful listings from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

“When we launch this, you’re going to come to Yahoo to search for people,” said Larry Cornett, Yahoo vice-president. Similarly, searches for a given sort of restaurant produced information from the review site Yelp, while those beginning with “how to” generated view-able instructional videos.

Bing likewise presents more usable results upfront than Microsoft’s old Live search, cutting down on the need to pick links to click through.

Other Yahoo properties are also being revamped and will follow the look of the main Yahoo page. Many will bring in access to social media elsewhere and are aimed at building more social functionality within Yahoo.

Yahoo’s US-leading mail application will prompt those signing in for a status update, which can be broadcast to the user’s Facebook and other services as well as propagated to the person’s Yahoo contact list.