NEW DELHI, INDIA: Ten months into her role at Yahoo!, Carol Bartz fended off repeated questions and comparisons with Google, at a lunch meeting with editors in Delhi. She was on her first visit to India as CEO of the leading Internet company, having visited India several times in earlier roles.

“Google is a search company,” Bartz said. “Search is just 3 per cent of what a user does online. The rest of the time they're connecting, emailing, consuming information and entertainment.” That, Bartz said, is where Yahoo!'s strength is, as the “front page to the Internet” for the world's users. She added that three of four people in India who access the Internet do it through Yahoo!. “Yes, we do compete with Google for search, which is half our business,” she said in response to a query.

Yahoo! is also a media company, the world's biggest, said Bartz, with 600 million users, and 9 billion ads served to them daily. “We have the biggest ad network in the world.. we lead in display advertising. We have the top scientists in display advertising, a 350-strong lab with PhDs in economics, sociology, and other areas,” she added. Yahoo!'s top two services by revenue were display advertising, and search advertising.

Bartz also described meetings with prime minster Manmohan Singh, and later with Nandan Nilekani, to understand the UID project.

Responding to a question Bartz said Yahoo! had no plans to offer cloud-based services to enterprises. “We have a private cloud. We don't intend it to be a public cloud. Yes, the margins may be higher in the enterprise business, but we don't intend to be there.” Bartz said, adding that some of Yahoo!'s central cloud research and development was happening in India (in Bangalore).

She however fended off queries on what exactly Yahoo! was, other than to say it was “the center of people's lives online”. “I don't mind it being described as a portal,” Bartz said. But pressed further, she declined to describe her choice of category Yahoo! would fall into if it was not a portal.

Yahoo! claims to have strong presence in the mobile space, with Yahoo!'s India head Arun Tadkani describing deals with all major mobile operators, covering 96 per cent of mobile users in India. “Yahoo! is the leading player in the mobile space,” he said. Globally, according to Bartz, Yahoo! has a “a small edge over Google” in mobile search, with software running on 1,900 phone platforms. This is as compared with PC-based web search, where Google is far ahead.

Over the past two years Yahoo! also made investments in Tyroo (an ad network), CallEasy, and BharatMatrimony, apart from a tie-up with Dainik Jagran.

Carol Bartz, formerly CEO and executive chairperson of Autodesk, joined Yahoo! as CEO and member of the board of Yahoo! in January this Year. The 15-year-old, $7 billion Internet services giant went through abortive merger discussions with Microsoft over several years, followed this year by a ten-year deal where Yahoo! search would be powered by Microsoft, as it once was powered by Google. “This time, however, we control the user experience,” Bartz said. “The deal makes a lot of sense as it leaves us free to focus on things other than developing search technology.” The deal was criticized by analysts for giving up core expertise to a rival, with Bartz countering that saying that Yahoo! was not a search company. Bartz has had her hands improving Yahoo!'s operating margin, which she has described as “terrible”.

Among the many cost-saving measures adopted by her has been Yahoo!'s controversial termination of GeoCities, the free Web hosting service, end-October. The action, which brought down over 7 million of the Internet's early websites, mostly personal web pages, is being described by media and web users as a deletion of the Internet's history.