Anyone not a friend of Microsoft...

...is, by definition, a friend of Rico's.

Stephen Shankland has an article at CNetNews.com about Yahoo Japan:

If there was any doubt that Yahoo Japan is separate from Yahoo in the United States, let this dispel it:
Yahoo Japan has signed a deal to use Google's search engine rather than Microsoft's.
The deal, reported by All Things Digital, was confirmed later by a Google Japan blog post.
In the post, Daniel Alegre, vice president of Google's Asia Pacific and Japan operations, said Yahoo Japan will use Google search results and Google's technology for supplying the accompanying search ads. With such partnerships, revenue from the search ads is shared between the website and the company that supplies the ads, in this case Yahoo Japan and Google, respectively.
The deal is a blow to Microsoft, which has been working for years to match not just the utility of Google's market-leading search service, but also its scale. Yahoo plugged in Microsoft's Bing search engine to supply search results, but evidently Microsoft couldn't convince Yahoo Japan to follow suit in that prime market.
Yahoo is an investor in Yahoo Japan, but it's not the only one (Softbank holds a bigger share) so Yahoo Japan's decisions don't necessarily align with that of Yahoo.

Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science.