Yahoo! provided a glimpse at the faded internet search star’s future identity that included making its web pages more personalised and social.

“You are going to see some changes from us,” Yahoo! chief product officer Blake Irving promised at a “Product Runway” event at the firm’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. “You are going to see things that happen fast, that are innovative and that make customers and advertisers delighted.”

Mr Irving joined Yahoo! 100 days earlier as part of change brought about by chief executive Carol Bartz, who replaced company co-founder Jerry Yang as head of what was a floundering internet search pioneer being lost in Google’s growing shadow.

Under Ms Bartz, Yahoo! struck a recently implemented deal to have internet queries at its web pages handled by Microsoft’s new Bing search engine.

Engineers at Yahoo! showed off new products, tools and services they have been able to create since shifting the “block-and-tackle” labour of scouring the web to Microsoft.

Yahoo! has revamped its free web-based e-mail service and is weaving Twitter into its online pages so people can more easily fire off or view updates at the microblogging service. Yahoo! already allows for Facebook updates and lets users import contact information from the social network.

With the goal of getting more of its 600 million users around the world to visit Yahoo! pages more, the websites will begin honoring Facebook and Twitter account sign-ins, according to Irving.

“The integration done with Facebook and Twitter is acknowledgement that this is what people are doing,” Mr Irving said.

“But the social networking game isn’t over because we are going to integrate social websites. There is definitely a place that Yahoo! can go based on the assets we have today and the technology.”

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