Yahoo has announced that it will sell half of its Alibaba stake back to the Chinese e-commerce giant. The company will sell half of its 40% stake on a valuation of approximately $35 billion. Yahoo stated that the payment would be least $6.3 billion in cash, with around $800 million in freshly issued Alibaba stock. The deal also stipulates that when an initial IPO is made for Alibaba in the future, the company will be required to repurchase a quarter of Yahoo's current stake, or allow Yahoo to sell those shares in the IPO.

Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo's global media head, has been appointed as interim CEO after CEO Scott Thompson stepped down. Thompson stepped down after it was revealed that his resume exaggerated his academic credentials. Yahoo did not elaborate on the reasons for Thompson’s departure, only saying that he has “left the company” in a statement made on Sunday.

Yahoo has taken steps to improve its video broadcasting, and has appointed three video content executives to help revamp the company's broadcasting unit. Yahoo has appointed John D. Hayes, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of American Express Company; Peter Liguori, former Chief Operating Officer of Discovery Communications, Inc. and former Chairman and President of Entertainment of Fox Broadcasting Network; and Thomas J. McInerney, the outgoing Chief Financial Officer of IAC/InterActiveCorp.

Yahoo is filing a lawsuit against Facebook claiming infringement of patents covering advertising, privacy controls and social networking. In a court filing, Yahoo said that Facebook infringes 10 of its patents.Yahoo had first threatened Facebbok with a lawsuit last month, and demanded that the social network license the patents.

According to research by ComScore, Facebook’s 1.3 trillion display ad impressions accounted for 27.9% of all the display ads served online in 2011. It was followed by Yahoo, with 529 billion impressions. These companies’ dominance of display ads is likely due to their ability to target ads to relevant visitors.

Microsoft's Bing search engine now ranks second behind Google. According to statistics released on Wednesday by comScore Inc., Bing and Microsoft's other websites fielded 2.75 billion search requests in the U.S. during December, beating Yahoo for the first time. Bing's December search volume translated into a 15.1% share of U.S. search traffic, while Yahoo had 2.65 billion search requests, which amounted to a 14.5% share.