Yahoo to compete with Bing despite Microsoft deal

Yahoo Inc. said it has revamped its search to compete against Microsoft Corp's Bing, even as it relies on the Redmond giant to power its queries.

The announcement of plans to put a new face on Yahoo Messenger and Mail and add functions to its search engine came after news that Google and Yahoo each lost a fraction of a point of US search share to Microsoft last month.

"We are not a version of Bing," Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior vice president of Yahoo, said to reporters at the company's headquarters.

"We are Yahoo and that will continue... We collaborate on the back-end but we are competitors on the front-end," he said.

At the end of last month, Microsoft and Yahoo signed a ten-year deal under which search on Yahoo's websites will be generated by Microsoft's new Bing search engine. The companies hope the deal will take effect early next year.

Microsoft will license Yahoo's search technology, allowing it to integrate certain aspects of it into Bing. Microsoft's advertising search product, AdCentre, will also replace Yahoo's equivalent product, Panama.

Mr Raghavan said that when Microsoft sends ads along with its answers to queries, Yahoo may or may not use all of them, depending on a complex formula.