• Reuters, Thursday, June 4, 2009 1:01 PM

Speaking at an investor conference, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz stressed that the Web giant isn't under any pressure to do a deal with Microsoft. "Yahoo doesn't have to do anything with Microsoft about anything," Bartz said, adding: "We are a damned big, important site."

However, despite these assertions, Bartz said that combining Yahoo's search technology with Microsoft could provide important benefits of scale, and in turn, improve the company's monetization of its search service. She said a partnership could save Yahoo up to $700 million in costs. Analysts had pegged the annual cost savings of a search partnership with Microsoft at between $1.1 billion and $1.6 billion.

Regarding Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, Bartz said it would give Microsoft some "uplift" in the search market, but would not fundamentally change the competitive landscape. "They're not going to get scale through Bing. They're going to get some temporary interest," she said.

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