Yahoo is still very much committed to search, the company said in response to a media report claiming that the search engine had conceded the search battle to Google.

Two company executives in a posting on the Yahoo! Search Blog emphasised that they considered the battle far from over:" We are still in the early days of search. As all of us at Yahoo agree, we're in it for the long haul, and we're in it to win."

The posting was signed by Qi Lu, vice president for Search Engineering and Eckart Walther, vice president for Search Products.

Yahoo was forced to respond after the Bloomberg press agency published a news story that quoted Yahoo chief financial officer Susan Decker as saying: "We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google. It's not our goal to be the number one in internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."

The article was quickly picked up by blogs under headlines suggesting that Yahoo has stopped trying to compete with Google.

The executives ascribed the conclusion to speculation and confusion and pointed out that it is directly contradicted by recent Yahoo actions. The internet portal for instance launched its own search engine in February 2004, swapping out search technology provided by Google , and it keeps investing the technology.

The duo also talked up Yahoo projects and acquisitions including photography sharing and storage application Flickr, social computing network del.icio.us and My Web , a personal search service as proof that the company is continuing to innovate and help users get access to information through other ways than web searches.

Yahoo has been following many of the innovative search moves introduced by Google. In June of last year it introduced a search service that allowed users to interrogate and subscribe to services such as Factiva and Thomson Gale ( click here for full details ). Along with software giants Microsoft, Yahoo is a leader in the Open Content Alliance rival to Google Book Search, announced in October 2005 ( click here for full details ).