Bradley Horowitz comes close to bashfulness over the freedom he enjoys at Yahoo: "It's almost too much. They [chief executive Terry Semel and his team] are giving me all the leash in the world. They are just pouring gasoline on the fire and telling me to go for it," he grins, mixing metaphors enthusiastically.

Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo, now more than 10 years old, virtually invented the technology for finding information on the web but, in recent years, it has seen its star eclipsed by the upstart Google, contributor of the verb "to Google" to the English language, and by an increasingly aggressive Microsoft. Now it is fighting back on multiple fronts, not least of which is its core competence, web search.