Searching for Answers

It's over. The battle by Jerry Yang to reinvigorate the company he co-founded at the outset of the Web era is through.

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The Yahoo! Chief executive said Monday that he will step down from the top job at the portal as soon as the board finds a replacement. Yang's year-long tenure was marked by an awkward, failed courtship with Microsoft, a series of disjointed attempts to revive the foundering portal's fortunes and, finally, a collapsed deal with Internet kingpin Google.

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"All of you know that I have always, and will always, bleed purple. I will always do what I think is right for this great company," Yang wrote to employees in one of the odd, lengthy notes written without any capitalization. "While this step will be an adjustment for all of us, I know it's the right one."

When Yang took the job on June 18, 2007, his mission was simple: Make something happen. Since then, Yang has helped nix a takeover over from Microsoft, overseen the launch of a pair of efforts that have yet to counter Google's edge in search advertising and caved to Carl Icahn's threat of a proxy fight by giving up three seats on Yahoo's board to the corporate raider.

Microsoft's courtship was blunted by a proposed deal with Google. But earlier this month, Google chose to walk away from the plan after legal questions were raised about the arrangement by U.S. antitrust authorities. At a conference in San Francisco on the day when the deal went awry, Yang expressed frustration that Google wasn't willing to challenge the government's concerns in court.