Yahoo's Yang defends Yahoo's search biz

After Google-Yahoo search marriage falls apart, Yahoo's CEO says he's 'disappointed'

Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang said emphatically that despite the termination of the Google search partnership, Yahoo's search business isn't failing.

"There’s a perception that because we didn’t have the Google deal, we’re not doing well in search," said  Yang, who was interviewed by Federated Media CEO John Battelle, at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco Wednesday, the same day that Yahoo's search partnership with Google fell apart, in the face of antitrust regulatory pressure.

"It was incredibly important for us to participate and compete vigorously in the search marketplace. Throughout that period of time – March through now - we continue to see our Yahoo search marketplace become more robust. And, we’ve done a lot more to search on the query side.

"We're doing better in search than before this whole thing started."

Additionally, Yang suggested that Yahoo would have tried to make it work.

"We also felt that Google clearly decided that they did not want to stay in the deal," he said. " We’re disappointed about that."