Yahoo focuses on search

10 November 2005

In a clear signal that it is pursuing China's huge search market, Alibaba, which operates Yahoo's China site, unveiled a revamped Yahoo site that focuses on searching. "Yahoo today is not a portal. Yahoo today is a search engine," said Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba.com. Ma said at a press conference that he is prepared to spend top dollars to go after Baidu, China's top search engine, which owns 37% of the market to Yahoo's 32%. Daily searches by Chinese Internet users are expected to rise from 360 million this year to 816 million in 2007, according to Piper Jaffray, with annual revenues reaching US$1 billion by 2010, up from US$134 million today.