Gasta News:Microsoft’s Ballmer Seeks More Web-Search Agreements

Microsoft Corp. will aim to strike more agreements for its Web-search software to be included on computers and mobile phones, even though the deals may not always make money, Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said.
“It might still be a good marketing investment for us to make,” Ballmer said today in an interview in New York. The deals may not make “economic sense” at the outset, he said.
Microsoft, Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. form partnerships to make their search engines the default setting on computers and mobile phones to attract new users. Google can pay more for the deals without losing money, Ballmer said.
Google, the most-popular search engine, gets an estimated 9.5 cents to 10 cents on average in ad sales from each search, while Microsoft and Yahoo get 4 cents to 5 cents, Ballmer said. That means Google can give its partners 8 cents from each search, while Microsoft may have to lose money, he said.
“Google can bid them to a point where we are not economical,” said Ballmer, 52. Microsoft will probably do a “bit of investment” in those agreements as existing partnerships that companies have with Google and Yahoo expire, he said.
Microsoft handled about 8 percent of search queries in the U.S. in February, compared with Google’s 63 percent and Yahoo’s 21 percent, according to researcher ComScore Inc. Outside the U.S., Microsoft’s market share is even smaller.
Dell, Verizon
Kim Rubey, a spokeswoman for Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo, declined to comment on how much revenue the company makes per search. Google, based in Mountain View, California, didn’t have an immediate comment.
Microsoft struck partnerships to put its search software on Dell Inc. computers and Verizon Wireless mobile phones this year, beating out Google for the deals. Last year, Microsoft reached agreements with Hewlett-Packard Co., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Facebook Inc. Hewlett-Packard, the world’s biggest personal-computer maker, had a deal with Yahoo.
The agreements mean that new computers come preloaded with a toolbar that lets them use Microsoft’s Live Search. The search engine also appears on the home screen of some Verizon handsets and is included when customers download Sun’s Java software.
Ballmer reiterated that he’s interested in a search partnership with Yahoo because it “makes all the sense in the world.”
Ballmer said earlier today at a conference that he has spoken with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and that they will talk when it’s appropriate.
“What’s she been there now -- all of a month and a half, two months?,” Ballmer said in the interview. The Web-search industry has been harder for him and other executives to learn than most businesses, Ballmer said.
Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, rose 18 cents to $17.14 today in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have lost 12 percent this year.

Gasta to team up with Russian Search Engine Yandex

Yandex operate Russia’s largest internet search engine and are a leading Russian internet and technology company. Our goal is to provide easy access to the wealth of information available online to answer any questions our Russian-speaking users may have. We rely on our in-depth understanding of the Russian language, culture and internet market to provide our users with sophisticated web search and information retrieval services. We also offer them a portal providing a range of other free services and extensive local, national and international information, including user-generated content, which we aggregate and structure in a neutral and user-friendly manner. We believe that putting the needs of our users first is the foundation for the success of our business.

Russian education has historically focused on science and technology, valuing strong applied mathematics and data analysis skills. From our start, we have benefited from this focus, drawing upon the considerable pool of technically proficient, local talent in Russia to create a leading technology company. For more than 15 years, our team has been developing and optimizing our web search and other technologies, earning the trust of our users and making Yandex one of the best known internet brands in Russia.

During the first quarter of 2008, our flagship internet search engine accounted for approximately 54% of all search traffic in Russia, according to Liveinternet.ru, and was one of the top 10 search engines in the world during that period, according to comScore. Over that same time period, our portal generated a monthly average of approximately 3.2 billion page views, including 900 million search results pages.

History of Yandex

The history of Yandex dates back to 1990, when Arcadia Inc., which later became CompTek, initially developed two informational search systems: the International Classifier of Inventions and the Goods and Services Classifier. These systems provided the foundation for Yandex’s technology.

In 1993, the founders of CompTek created Yandex as a search mechanism for the Russian language. Some of our portal’s users have speculated on the etymological origins of the word. One of the more imaginative theories suggested a correlation of “Yan” to the white and “sunny” half of the Yin-Yang symbol. To put the rumors to rest on the meaning of the name, the two founders, Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, coined the term “Yandex” as an acronym for the phrase “Yet Another Indexer.”

From 1993 to 1994, Yandex’s developers collaborated with the Russian Academy of Sciences to enhance the system’s linguistic capabilities, tailoring it to the Russian language. As an “inflective” language, Russian uses numerous word variations to reflect grammatical purpose and meaning. A key technological advantage of Yandex is that it automatically searches all possible forms of a given word, making each search more accurate.

Another important feature of Yandex’s search technology is morphology hypotheses building, that takes into account the distance between the searched words within sentences and paragraphs. Furthermore, Yandex.ru indexes and searches documents in the major Cyrillic languages — Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian — as well as in English, French, and German that might be of interest to the Russian-speaking audience