The social networking initiative of Yahoo! named the "Yahoo! Pulse" has grown to become the forth largest social networking portal in India with 3.5 million unique users, according to research firm Comscore.

Yahoo finished the transfer of its web and mobile search functions to Microsoft’s latest Bing search engine with the hope that the two companies will use their combined market power may to pose a more significantly big threat to the Google domination in the web world.

The chief of Yahoo! Labs, Prabhakar Raghavan has said that the company intends to include social elements while developing technology for the users around the world.

Mr. Raghavan during a visit to Bangalore said that the company is studying interface between computer science and social sciences to have greater understanding of advertiser behavior and is looking into other tools to understand user behavior.

The largest internet portal in Japan, Yahoo! Japan in is set to tie with Google for integrating its search engine technology to the portal. Yahoo! Japan chose Google over Microsoft is surprising because Microsoft under a global partnership is set to offer its search technology to the company.

Yahoo! Japan, which is the largest Internet portal in the country, is expected to enter into an alliance with Google to adopt its search engine instead of rival Microsoft, according to a report.

The alliance between Yahoo and Google will create a dominating portal in Japan and will be a big bow to Microsoft, according to experts. The deal between the two is expected to be announced as soon as Tuesday.

In what can be seen as Yahoo’s pertinent move to salvage some of its lost impetus by venturing into the social networking arena, the company has recently announced a strategic partnership with the popular microblogging site, Twitter.

Yahoo has finally bought Arabic online portal Maktoob.com with more than 16.5 million unique users, to enhance its reach in the region.

However, Maktoob's Arabic search engine (Arabia) and Souq.com, are not part of the latest deal. The portal will be rechristened as 'Yahoo Maktoob'.

Maktoob.com, launched in 1997, is largely known for its social networking offerings. Earlier this year, the portal has started a business portal.

However, the company officials from both companies have declined to disclose the value of the deal.