Yahoo has bought a 30 percent stake in Info Network Management Company (INMAC), a company in Chennai in south India that specializes in telephone directory search.

Users in India will now be able to access information about local businesses and services through Yahoo Web sites such as Yahoo Local — and also by phone through the Call Ezee service offered by INMAC, said Keith Nilsson, senior vice president and head of emerging markets at Yahoo.

Starting with data integration of the two companies’ lists, Yahoo also plans to look at other ways of integrating the business models of INMAC and Yahoo, Nilsson said.

Yahoo did not disclose how much it paid for the stake in INMAC. The deal gives Yahoo representation on the company’s board, the company said. Yahoo also has a revenue-sharing agreement with INMAC, Nilsson said.

The Call Ezee service currently covers 14 cites across India. Consumers can call the local Call Ezee number from any mobile or fixed line phone, and request contact details of a business, or a list of businesses that offer the product or service they are looking for.

Indian businesses can be listed on the directory without any charge, although sales leads are charged on a premium listing or ‘pay for performance’ basis.

INMAC expects the funding provided by Yahoo to enable it to continue to develop its team and technology as it seeks to triple its reach across India over the next two years.

The Indian local search market is seeing significant changes, as consumers are increasingly using mobile phones to search for and find local businesses, Nilsson said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Search engine Yahoo! Inc will cut to three months the time it stores personal data gathered from Web surfing, making its retention policy the shortest among peers, the company said on Wednesday.

The company will “anonymize” the computer addresses of its users within three months in most cases, from a prior standard of 13 months. It is reserving the right to keep data for up to six months if fraud or system security are involved.

Internet search companies have come under pressure from European and other data protection officials to do more to protect the privacy of users.

Earlier this year, industry leader Google Inc halved the amount of time it stores personal data to nine months. Microsoft Corp has said it will cut the time to six months if its rivals did the same.

“Google first went to 18 months and started this competition,” said Ari Schwartz, vice president at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group.

Yahoo’s pledge is “significant because they are getting rid of some data after 90 days and they actually have an implementation plan to get this done,” he added.

The company is also expanding the scope of the data it is making anonymous, to include page and advertisement clicks and views, from just search log data alone.

The European Union has recommended that companies keep data no more than six months and urged the sector to adopt an industry-wide standard.

“This was our attempt to put a stake in the ground” on the issue, Yahoo vice president of policy and privacy chief Anne Toth said.

Internet search engines get their revenue by matching advertisements to searches, so advertisers can peg their ads to what is on the searcher’s mind.

RIVALS WEIGH IN

Microsoft said it welcomed the move, but made a distinction between the timeframe and the method of making data anonymous.

Yahoo will delete the final segment of the Internet Protocol (IP) address, which it said makes it no longer unique or identifiable.

Microsoft is deleting all of the Internet address, which it said will break any potential link to a particular set of search queries, according to Brendon Lynch, director of privacy strategy at the software giant.

“The best anonymization is to get rid of all the identifying information,” Schwartz said. “We are still not there on an industry standard.”

Google reiterated in a statement its current policy of nine months and said it is “continually evaluating” its policies with respect to privacy.

Ask.com, owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp., recently offered customers the ability to “opt out” of having their information stored for more than a few hours.

Yahoo’s Toth said the company is not considering such a policy.

Once the companies make commitments on data retention, they are enforceable under federal and state laws in the United States, Schwartz added.

Source: Yahoo

Yahoo! veteran to oversee Internet offerings for consumers, advertisers and publishers.

REDMOND, Washington, December 4 - Microsoft Corp. today announced that Dr. Qi Lu will join the company as president of the Online Services Group. Dr. Lu will lead Microsoft’s efforts in search and online advertising and all the company’s online information and communications services. Dr. Lu will report to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer.

Lu most recently served as executive vice president of Engineering for the Search and Advertising Technology Group at Yahoo!, where he was responsible for development efforts around Yahoo!’s Web search and monetization platforms. Dr. Lu left Yahoo! in August 2008 after 10 years of service.

“I am tremendously excited to welcome Qi to Microsoft,” Ballmer said. “Dr. Lu’s deep technical expertise, leadership capabilities and hard-working mentality are well-known in the technology industry, and Microsoft will benefit from his addition to our executive management team.”

“I am genuinely excited about the opportunities ahead for Microsoft to make an enormous impact on the online industry,” Dr. Lu said. “Microsoft has built a great foundation for its search and advertising technologies and put an amazing team of researchers and engineers in place to drive the next wave of innovation in online services. I’m looking forward to working with them to help transform the way people and businesses use the Internet to find and share information.”

Before his most recent role at Yahoo!, Lu was vice president of engineering responsible for the technology development of Yahoo!’s Search and Marketplace business unit, which includes the company’s search, e-commerce, and local listings of businesses and products.

Before joining Yahoo! in 1998, Dr. Lu was a Research Staff Member at IBM Almaden Research Center. Before IBM, Dr. Lu worked at Carnegie Mellon University as a Research Associate, and at Fudan University in China as a faculty member. Dr. Lu holds 20 U.S. patents, and received his bachelor of science and master of science in computer science from Fudan University and his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Lu’s first day at Microsoft will be Jan. 5, 2009. In his role running the Online Services Group, he will oversee several groups including the Advertiser & Publisher Solutions business, managed by Scott Howe who was promoted to corporate vice president; the Online Audience business, managed by Senior Vice President Yusuf Mehdi; OSG Research & Development, managed by Senior Vice President Satya Nadella; and OSG Finance, managed by Rik van der Kooi who was promoted to corporate vice president.

With the successful integration of aQuantive now complete, Brian McAndrews, former CEO of aQuantive and senior vice president of Microsoft’s Advertiser & Publisher Solutions Group, has decided to transition out of Microsoft, and will do so over the next several months, serving in a consultative capacity to Steve Ballmer and Qi Lu during that time.

“Brian McAndrews built a world-class business for advertisers and publishers and led the successful integration of aQuantive into Microsoft, setting the foundation for our next phase of growth,” Ballmer said. “While I am sorry to see Brian leave the company, I respect and understand his decision and wish him nothing but the best in the future.”

“I also want to congratulate Scott and Rik on their well-deserved promotions and look forward to their leadership in the Online Services Group alongside Qi, Yusuf and Satya,” Ballmer said.

As part of today’s announcement, several teams will move to further align resources. The field sales organizations in the Online Services Group will move to Microsoft’s centralized Sales, Marketing and Services Group led by chief operating officer Kevin Turner. This group, called Consumer & Online, will be led by Corporate Vice President Darren Huston and will include the Global Advertising Sales and Services organization, led by vice president Bill Shaughnessy.

Source: Microsoft Corp.

Microsoft software is important discussions the company for the purchase of online search from Yahoo for about 20 billion U.S. dollars, the media, the report says. A few months ago, Yahoo has a takeover offer from Microsoft worth about $ 47 billion U.S. dollars.

“Software giant Microsoft is in negotiations to Yahoo online search company for 20 billion U.S. dollars. The proposal is part of a complex, with the support from Microsoft a new management team to control Yahoo. But there is no intention, Another custodian of Microsoft public offering on the Internet giant, after the failed $ 47.5-billion offer this summer,”

The Sunday Times reported. According to the report assumes that Jonathan Miller, former president and CEO of AOL, and Ross Levinsohn, former president of Fox Interactive Media, were designed to reflect the new management team. “Senior Directors of Microsoft and Yahoo are involved in the adoption of the general terms of an agreement, but there is no guarantee that this will succeed,” said the publication in an online report on Sunday.

The Sunday Times said that under the terms of the transaction, Microsoft will be a $ 5 billion in the simple and Miller Levinsohn management team. The duo would be U.S. $ 5 billion more than investors.

This money is used for the purchase of convertible bonds and preferred shares ran to him to use more than 30 percent of Yahoo, has the report. “Foreign investors also have the right, three of 11 Yahoo administrators. The Microsoft talks with Yahoo include the acquisition of a 10-year operation to the affairs of the research. She wants a two-year contract option for the purchase of the company for 20 billion U.S. dollars. This would be for the execution of Yahoo’s own e-mail system, e-mail and content services, “The Sunday Times.

The report adds that it is envisaged that the operating costs to an increase in income from Yahoo of around 2 billion U.S. dollars per year. Interestingly also, the offer to repurchase from Microsoft, Yahoo shares with a value of $ 33 per piece, and since the mestizos emerged in less than nine dollars.

The takeover bid was primarily driven by a Yahoo The Chief Executive Jerry Yang, which earlier this month, his decision to resign from his post, but remains a part of the company. Moreover, Yang, who also co-founder, was wants to Hopes for a page of advertising from Google, but the matter was primarily due to legal concerns.

Even if Microsoft and Yahoo to remain profitable, the two companies far behind Google on the Web. “More than half of the $ 40 billion online market for advertising on the Internet from the ads and research analysts estimate Google has about 77 percent of spending compared to Yahoo at 18 percent by Microsoft and by five percent,” the report says.

Source: BS

9^th July 08, Yahoo has extend yahoo open strategy and launched Yahoo Search BOSS. BOSS is a web service platform that will give companies and developers to create same web scale search product by using same technology that Yahoo search has.

What is BOSS?

BOSS is a open platform that provide programmatic access to the complete Yahoo! Search index via an API. BOSS allows developers to take advantage of Yahoo!’s production search infrastructure and technology, combine that with their own unique assets, and create their own search experiences. While search APIs have been available for some time, BOSS removes many of the usage restrictions that have prevented other companies from using them to build innovative new search engines.

BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is simple innovation in the search market. Every Search marketers knows that it is very hard to building a high quality, web-scale search engine. Marketers need to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in engineering, sciences and core infrastructure — from crawling and indexing technology to relevancy and machine learning algorithms, to stuff as mundane as data centers, servers and power. Yahoo’s new invention “BOSS platform” may change the search industry.

For more information on BOSS visit Yahoo Search Blog.