NEW Profiles: Yahoo, Google and Microsoft

[dhilipkumar]

Google has pulled out of an advertising deal with Yahoo in the latest chapter of a saga that stemmed from Microsoft's attempts to buy Yahoo at the start of the year. Here we take a closer look at the three US corporate giants.

YAHOO

Yahoo is the world's second most popular internet search engine, yet it trails far behind market leader Google.

A study in August last year showed that Google carried out 37 billion searches that month, while Yahoo did only 8.5 billion.

As a result, Yahoo's advertising revenues are also far lower than Google's.

Yahoo posted a loss for all four quarters of 2007, and is now continuing with job cuts and other cost reduction work.

Founded in 1995, Yahoo is based in Sunnyvale, California, and led by chief executive Jerry Yang.
It currently employs 14,300 staff.

GOOGLE

Google was set up in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who had met at Stanford University, and is now the world's most used search engine.

Its shares were listed on Wall Street at a price of $85 in August 2004 and now trade at about $350 a share.
It reported net income of $1.35bn (£844m) for the three months to the end of September 2008.

It has more than 17,000 employees in 20 countries and its headquarters, the Googleplex, are in Mountain View, California.

Among its recent acquisitions have been YouTube and Doubleclick.

MICROSOFT

The world's dominant provider of personal computer operating systems, Microsoft has a market share of about 90%.

Founded in 1975, it now enjoys annual revenues of $51bn and has a workforce of 79,000.
Headquartered in Washington State, founder Bill Gates is the world's richest man.

Mr Gates has an estimated personal fortune of $56bn.

The company's dominant market position has led to numerous criticisms that it stifles competition.

In February, the European Commission launched two new anti-competition investigations into the company.
The Commission had previously fined Microsoft a record 497m euros for anti-competition practices in 2004, a ruling Microsoft eventually lost on appeal last year.