(Continued)

In other developments, Yahoo launched a Chinese-language search portal on Monday, following Google's lead for a stronger foothold in one of the world's biggest Internet markets. The introduction of Yahoo's new Web site, www.yisou.com, follows Google's acquisition last week of a minority stake in Baidu.com, China's biggest independent Internet search engine and one of Google's strongest rivals here.

"Yahoo believes the introduction of Yisou will help extend our reach into the rapidly growing search market in China," said David Lu, Yahoo North Asia's vice president of search and marketplace, in a statement. Yahoo China already has a Chinese search company, 3721, which it acquired last year for $120 million.

Google has offered Chinese-language searches since 2000 and is hugely popular among China's more than 80 million Internet users --the world's second biggest Internet market after the U.S.

In other news, in a surprise announcement on Tuesday, Google said it is preparing to publicly release some of its underlying software code, only months before it undertakes a multibillion-dollar stock-exchange float. These news were totally unexpected by many observers in the search community, including yours truly. The revelation comes as Google considers Melbourne Australia for the home of a regional research and development centre, in an effort to triple its global workforce over the next 12 months.

The time has come for Google to "give something back", Wayne Rosing, the company's vice-president of engineering, told students while on a recruiting drive in Melbourne last week. "There have been a lot of conversations in the company in the past two months about how it's time for us to give something back. So our technical director, Craig Silverstein, has started a project to look at all the Google code and start figuring out what parts of it we want to give back," Rosing said.

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