Seems the battleground between the major Search engines has shifted to China. Following Google's interest in Baidu - that recently went public and whose stock is performing well - Yahoo has announced a billion dollar investment in Alibaba - a Chinese ecommerce site.

The billion dollar's gets Yahoo! a 40% stake in the company.

A recent MarketWatch article gives a good overview of the recent increase in activity of search engine and tech stock in the Asian continent.