'We Can Deliver Customers on a Global Basis'

That becomes clear as you compare the home pages of Yahoo!'s nearly two-dozen properties. Pull up the mother ship's site along with, say, Yahoo! Japan's, and the differences (aside from language itself) seem quite subtle at first. "There's a certain je ne sais quoi about this one," Killen says as she pulls up Yahoo! Japan on her computer. She then points to a pink-tinted box containing links to all of the site's shopping pages. (The box is white on the U.S. site.) "In the U.S., we wouldn't put this shopping box in pink because that's not an appropriate color here. So Yahoo! Japan is a wee bit different. But overall it still looks like Yahoo!"

The power of that policy becomes evident once you go deeper into Yahoo!'s international sites. Although the 14 top-line categories for the Web directories are the same across all of its sites, subcategories begin to diverge both in name and in content as cultural differences and interests become more localized. For example, log on for a political chat at Yahoo!'s UK & Ireland site, and you can choose to discuss such topics as the Falkland Islands War or the Irish peace process. Do the same on Yahoo! Argentina, and you can discuss the same war, but it goes by an entirely different name. (Despite losing the war against England nearly two decades ago, Argentines still defiantly call the South Atlantic islands "Islas Malvinas.")

Getting such cultural cues correct doesn't just save embarrassment, it prevents alienating the very customers you're trying to woo. "You've got to get the local culture and the language exactly right," says Don DePalma, 46, vice president of corporate strategy at global Internet consultancy Idiom Inc., who points to studies showing that doing so dramatically increases a site's stickiness, as well as the likelihood that users will buy something. "If you don't appeal to people's cultural motivators -- ethnicity, language, point of view, values -- they'll simply click elsewhere. And if you inadvertently offend them, they'll do so even faster."

Indeed, global-marketing lore is replete with stories of botched translations. DePalma cites the Chinese advertisement for Pepsi that turned its "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" slogan into one reading "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave." He also mentions the motto for Perdue Farms that changed "It takes a strong man to make a tender chicken" into a Spanish version that read "It takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate."

Some minor faux pas can be avoided with the aid of clever-technology software. For example, because Yahoo!'s sites in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK and Ireland share a directory database with Yahoo!'s U.S. site, the company's software engineers created a "Britspell" script. The program automatically grooms all pages seen by British-English speakers, ensuring that words like "colour" are spelled appropriately and that "football" always refers to the game played with a round, black-and-white ball.

As a rule, however, Yahoo! largely avoids the use of translated text. Instead, Web surfers and content producers at each international site build their directories and content partnerships from in-language sites and local media sources. They resort to translation only for information that is common to all Yahoo! sites, such as instructions for using email, chatting, or bidding on an auction. "Content has got to be local," Killen says, "and the only way to do that is to hire people who know the culture and the language intimately and to partner with local content and distribution players."

Given Yahoo!'s predilection for open, nonexclusive content relationships, that's not always easy. As a portal that aggregates information, rather than one that creates it, Yahoo! has long pursued a strategy of including as many sources as possible. It has even gone so far as to offer links to other portals when a Yahoo! search comes up empty. And while it may feature some content providers more prominently than others (such as Reuters, which was once a Yahoo! investor), it instructs its local producers to steer clear of exclusive partnerships that would otherwise prevent those producers from featuring content from competing sources.

Overall, the open-access policy serves Yahoo!'s users by giving them nearly every information source available. But in some international markets where a few companies control most of the local news, that policy sometimes has the opposite effect. Despite Yahoo!'s best efforts to strike up a partnership with a Brazilian financial-news publisher, that provider has balked at distributing its news via Yahoo!'s Brazil-based Web site (especially on a nonexclusive basis). That has proved frustrating to the people behind the portal's efforts to create a robust financial-news offering. "Our biggest challenge is dealing with old, old monopolies that don't understand the openness of the Internet," says Roberto Alonso, 49, vice president and managing director of Yahoo! Latin America, who has had similar trouble getting the region's big banks to sign deals. "They don't see the value of distribution."