Yahoo still considers Bing a search competitor

24.08.2009
Yahoo hopes to remain relevant and competitive in the search engine market, battling for users not only against nemesis Google but also against its future search partner, Microsoft.

So said Yahoo executives during a press conference on Monday during which they announced enhancements to Yahoo's search engine, Web mail and instant messaging products, three areas that Yahoo considers key to its success.

Although Yahoo will rely on Microsoft's Bing to provide it with search crawling and indexing, Yahoo will work separately on its search user interface, and will do its best to make it more useful than Google's and even Microsoft's.

"We collaborate [with Microsoft] on the back end, but we compete on the front end," said Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo's senior vice president of labs and search strategy.

In fact, the heavy-lifting, back-end work of crawling and indexing the Web is of less strategic importance in search right now than the user interface experience, he said.

"What we want to compete on is the front-end experience," Raghavan said. "The battle has moved beyond the back end."