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Way to friggin’ go, Carol! Yahoo’s fourth quarter revenues were lower than a year ago, but they beat the high bound of the company’s outlook forecast range, leading to a $119 million profit as opposed to last year’s $278 million loss. Chalk that up as another victory for CEO Carol Bartz.

Display ads were up 26%, the biggest gain since 2006. Search ads went up 8%, primarily because of improved targeting algorithms, the company claimed. Employee headcount grew by about 300, marking an end for now to repeated rounds of layoffs.

And remember, the advertising deal with Microsoft has yet to result in either side paying the other. Things won’t kick into gear until next year.

Here are the relevant stats from the earnings report:

Revenues were $1,732 million for the fourth quarter of 2009, which exceeded the top end of the Company’s business outlook range.

Revenues decreased 4 percent from the fourth quarter of 2008 and increased 10 percent from the third quarter of 2009.

Revenues were $6,460 million for 2009, a decrease of 10 percent compared to 2008. Excluding the impact of currency rate fluctuations and divested business lines, revenues for 2009 would have declined 6 percent compared to 2008.

Income from operations for the fourth quarter of 2009 was $119 million, compared to a loss of $278 million in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Net income per diluted share for the fourth quarter of 2009 was $0.11, including charges of $0.04 per share related to the Microsoft search agreement and restructuring charges. For fourth quarter of 2008, net loss per diluted share was $0.22, including a charge of $0.39 per share primarily related to a goodwill impairment.

The global search market grew a sizeable 46 percent between December 2008 and December 2009, from 89.7 billion to 131.4 billion searches conducted by people age 15 or older from home and work locations. These searches include the top properties where search activity is observed, not only the core search engines. Google of course took first place, but Microsoft managed to see the biggest percentage change, at least when looking at the top five search properties. When you represent the data visually, though, a larger percentage change isn’t so formidable:

Data source: comScore

Google sites grabbed 87.8 billion searches (66.8 percent of the global market) last month, showing a 58 percent increase in search query volume over the past year. Yahoo sites meanwhile ranked second globally, with 9.4 billion searches (7.2 percent), a growth of 13 percent. Chinese search engine Baidu saw 8.5 billion searches (6.5 percent), a growth of 7 percent. Microsoft sites managed to take 4.1 billion searches (3.1 percent), a growth of 70 percent, thanks to the successful introduction of Bing in June 2009. eBay took fifth place with 2.1 billion searches (1.6 percent), a solid gain of 58 percent.

When breaking down the searches by country, the US represented the largest individual search market in the world with 22.7 billion searches (17.3 percent of searches conducted globally). Despite the fact that China has a larger Internet population, it ranked second with 13.3 billion searches (10.1 percent), followed by Japan with 9.2 billion (7.0 percent), the UK with 6.2 billion (4.8 percent), and Germany with 5.6 billion (4.3 percent).

Microsoft will have to follow Yahoo’s policy of keeping search data for three months if the Microhoo 10-year partnership goes through later this year. That means the Microsoft will have to delete any personal data it gets from the Yahoo after three months.

Earlier this week, Microsoft decided to comply with the EU’s request to cut down search data retention to six months. At the time, we also noted that Google keeps its data for nine months and Yahoo keeps data for three months. Naturally, Yahoo was pleased it was winning at least one aspect of the search war, so it sent over the following statement to us.

“Yahoo! is extremely proud of our Data Anonymization Policy which has received wide support and affirms our commitment to help protect our users’ privacy,” a Yahoo spokesperson told Ars. “Yahoo!’s policy both dramatically reduces the time we hold personal data and increases the scope of log data covered under the policy.” 

We followed up with the company about a Bing-Yahoo deal. “Microsoft will need to comply with Yahoo! policies for data we convey to them,” a Yahoo spokesperson told Ars.

This seems to make perfect sense as data retention rules should still apply even if the data changes hands, but we contacted Redmond to make sure the duo’s opinions aligned. “Microsoft will follow Yahoo!’s privacy practices for search data that it receives from Yahoo!,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. “In particular, Microsoft will adhere to Yahoo!’s data retention policy with respect to all searches and IP addresses that Yahoo! collects and passes to Microsoft.”

Microsoft’s search engine Bing, ever at the ready to distinguish itself from other popular search engines, has added a feature-rich recipe search tool that makes finding recipes painless.

Visit Bing.com and type in any ingredient: ground chuck, quinoa, kidney beans, bacon, you name it and Bing will comb through recipe sites to return results. Click on the Recipes link and you’ll see a list of recipes which include the item you searched for. Every recipe has a picture, description, the name of the site where the recipe was found, and some easy visual guides like the rating that recipe has been given and whether or not the recipe is high or low in fat and calories.

On the sidebar you can drill down through the results by clicking on things like Cuisine (Vegetarian, Southern, etc.), Convenience (Quick/Easy, Make-Ahead, Kid-Friendly, etc.) and even things like which course it will be served in, for what occasion you’re serving it, and what tools you want to use—pressure cooker? microwave?—to help you get the most out of the devices you have in your kitchen.

Check out the video below to see it in action:

Have a favorite tool for finding recipes or maximizing the contents of your pantry and fridge? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Microsoft’s search engine Bing went down for a half hour last night from 6:30 to 7 PM PST. Back in July an impressive 10% of you had switched to Bing for your search engine duties, and if reports are to be believed, that number’s probably only grown since, so we’re curious if you were affected, and if so, whether this shakes your confidence in Bing.

It’s one thing for webapps like Gmail or Twitter to go down, but when your search engine of choice is down for a whopping half hour, that’s a serious hiccup. (As TechCrunch points out, imagine if Google.com went down—”the Internet would grind to a halt.” Some would consider this a big black eye for Bing, but we’d guess it also means the folks at Bing will be very careful to ensure it never happens again. Fingers crossed. [Bing Blog, TechCrunch]

The Microsoft-Yahoo search and advertising deal, first announced back in July, has just been finalized by the two companies.

Back in October, it was revealed that details were still being mulled over because of the deal’s complexity, but this afternoon, the companies put out a statement to let the world know that the deal is now complete.

Here’s the statement:

Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corporation today announced that the companies have finalized and executed the definitive Search and Advertising Services and Sales Agreement and License Agreement in accordance with the letter agreement announced in July.

The companies released the following joint statement:

“Microsoft and Yahoo! believe that this deal will create a sustainable and more compelling alternative in search that can provide consumers, advertisers and publishers real choice, better value, and more innovation.

“Yahoo! and Microsoft welcome the broad support the deal has received from key players in the advertising industry and remain hopeful that the closing of the transaction can occur in early 2010.”

Now, we wait for Bing to become Yahoo’s search engine, a process that likely won’t be completed until late next year, but will have major implications on the search landscape once complete.

Tags: bing, microsoft, Yahoo

Australia and Canada have both approved the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo search and advertising deal, making them the first regulators in the world to sign off on it, giving Microhoo two fewer antitrust authority groups to worry about. “Microsoft and Yahoo! have been notified that Australian and Canadian authorities have separately concluded their reviews and have no objections to our proposed search agreement,” the two companies said in a joint statement. “We continue to believe that this deal will create a true, competitive alternative in the marketplace that will benefit consumers, advertisers and publishers. We remain hopeful that the agreement will close in early 2010.” The United States and Europe are still evaluating the proposal and have not yet reached any final decisions.

With the launch of Bing in June 2009, Microsoft’s search engine is being scrutinized a lot more than it has in its past incarnations. For example, we noted that at launch, Bing was blocking search queries pertaining to sexual content in about 20 percent of the regions it was officially supporting. Also at launch, The New York Times wrote about how Bing was censoring results in Chinese-language queries, even if they are conducted outside of China. On November 20, 2009, The New York Times posted an opinion article titled “Boycott Microsoft Bing” that said little has changed over the last five months:

Users of Microsoft’s Bing search engine will soon be able to bring up much more scientific/mathematical information, thanks to Microsoft’s deal with Wolfram Alpha.

In its blog post, the Bing team says it will be “providing access to Wolfram Alpha’s advanced algorithms and expertly curated data within the Bing experience,” and offers a couple specific examples of how that might actually be useful. The first couple are focused on fitness and health — you could bring up charts that allow you to compare nutritional data between different types of food , or you could calculate your body mass index. Through Wolfram Alpha, Bing can also do more complicated math now, such as plotting equations on a graph.

This Wolfram/Bing deal was actually first reported in August, but not announced until today. The two services seem like a good match, since they both like to bill themselves as not-exactly-search-engines — Wolfram calls itself a “computational knowledge engine,” while Bing says it’s a “decision engine.” More concretely, the partnership gives Bing another way it’s different from Google (assuming Google doesn’t strike a similar deal), while also a broader audience, not to mention revenue.

Speaking of Bing, Experian Hitwise is reporting that the site’s traffic grew 7 percent in October.

As a company, Yahoo is still trying to redefine itself. September’s site redesign and “You!” campaign launch were a sign of the company’s larger emphasis on content over search.

Still, with the Microsoft search deal still far from actually launching, the company is continuing its efforts at improving search capabilities, especially when it comes to media search. Today, Yahoo is launching Music Albums and Song Search as a Yahoo Video search feature.that lets music fans find music videos from their favorite artists and even view videos by album.

Type in an artist or band name into the video search box and you’ll get a list of music videos or other videos featuring the artist (you can choose to specify only official videos if you want to filter out any fan-videos or cover acts) and for many artists, the option to select a specific album to see videos associated with that record.

When you click on a video, you go to the site and a Yahoo! overlay appears, letting you save the page to delicious or share with a friend.

All in all the feature is pretty cool. That said, having to go to another site to view a video isn’t that convenient. It would be nice if Yahoo! instituted something like Bing’s auto-play video function.

What do you think of Yahoo’s new music video search? Will it alter how you search for music? Let us know!

Tags: music videos, video search, Yahoo, Yahoo Search