Yahoo Is Inviting Partners to Build on Its Search Technology ...

Me.dium offers a service in which users can see what Web sites their friends are visiting. That allows the company to collect information about what sites have “buzz” at any given time, said Kimbal Musk, the company’s chief executive. Me.dium will use that information to rearrange and supplement Yahoo’s search results, creating a service that captures the “social zeitgeist” of the Web, Mr. Musk said.

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“We think that for a good percentage of searches, we’ll get people to where they want to go a lot faster than regular search engines,” Mr. Musk said. He said it would have been impossible for Me.dium to create a search service on its own.

Yahoo estimates that it would cost $300 million to build a search service from scratch.

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Yahoo executives acknowledged that the new strategy, if successful, could cannibalize Yahoo’s own search business. But they said that if a search start-up became popular, it would probably take more users away from Google than from Yahoo, as Google has a far larger share of the market.

“We did a lot of analysis,” said Bill Michels, senior director for Yahoo’s open search platform. “We are comfortable with the risks associated with it.”

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