Newspapers may use Yahoo for search, too

Yahoo’s new newspaper partners are discussing ways to integrate Yahoo as their primary search provider.
Yahoo CFO Sue Decker said today that they are currently discussing providing search services to the newspapers’ web sites, and that they should have something to announce in the next few months.
Decker and executives from several publishers said there were multiple projects in the works across a variety of content areas, and the tenor of the call was that the agreement — originally reported as just about integrating job search — spanned multiple projects yet to be announced.
“We’re not able to disclose the term here,” Decker said. “But suffice to say this is a multi-year agreement with major committments to one another.”
Decker and the newspaper executives on the call said that there were currently no discussions about Yahoo selling advertising onto print publications, as Google does. However, the idea of using Yahoo’s technology as a single ad buying system for online properties remains “a real possibility.”
The executives on the call said that the newspapers would adopt the HotJobs platform completely by Q1 2007. In Q2 and Q3 the partners will begin to roll out other features and applications.