Yahoo has been trying to find itself for the last several years, while its stock price has been pummeled in the wake of Google's rise and Microsoft's aborted takeover attempt. Has it found itself?

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz's microphone cut out right as she began to respond to the question, "What is Yahoo?", posed by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington in an combative onstage interview today at the Disrupt conference in New York. The irony of the moment prompted audience mockery that set the tone for the rest of the interview.

Once her sound was restored, Bartz delivered a confused quote that made it sound like the company is still very much adrift.

"Yahoo is a great company that is very, very strong in content for its users," Bartz told Arrington. "It uses amazing technology to serve up what we increasingly think is going to be the Web of One."

Both interviewer and interviewee traded insults as Arrington pressed Bartz to explain the company's direction. The clearest comments Bartz made centered around personalization. Yahoo wants to run a site that users visit every day, and it wants to provide tailored content and advertising to visitors.

Eventually, Arrington asked Bartz if Yahoo is a search company. "Half of our revenues and profits are from search," Bartz responded. "Crawling and indexing the Web is a commodity."

What emerged over the course of the interview is that Yahoo has its hands in many areas but doesn't own any of them. Bartz frankly admitted that she would like to have Facebook's control of the social graph or Google's search dominance.

She came off defensive and abrasive in response to taunting, demeaning questions from Arrington. Bartz pointed out that it took Apple CEO Steve Jobs about seven years to turn the Cupertino company around after retaking his spot at the helm. "Seven years," Bartz said. "I've been at this company 15 months. Come on."

Yahoo needs to find itself fast, but Bartz does have a point that it takes time to define a company's direction. And it sounds like the company's employees have a fierce defender in the current CEO. "I don't want to hear any crap about something magical that the fine people of Yahoo are supposed to do in this short period of time," Bartz said.

Google announced today that it will now take a site's speed into account when calculating how high to rank it in search results.

In a post credited to Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, principal engineer for the Google Search Quality Team, the company explained its rationale:

Speeding up websites is important -- not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs.

However, the company assured webmasters that site speed isn't weighted nearly as heavily as concerns such as relevance. Google says that fewer than one percent of search queries have been affected by the change.

This is another example of how Google can flex its gatekeeping muscle to push for improvements to the overall functioning of the Web.

Google wants social features very badly, it seems. Damon Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of Aardvark, an interesting search startup that integrates social interaction and artificial intelligence, has today confirmed reports that the company has been acquired by Google.

I wrote recently about the company's approach to search--Aardvark uses artificial intelligence to find the right people to answer a user's query. It then trusts those people to provide the desired information and refine the query as needed.

I've used Aardvark a great deal in the months since, and I've found it invaluable for answering questions that benefit from human guidance or opinion. It's a great place, for example, to ask "How do I get started making electronic music?" or "What's a mind-blowing novel of first contact?"

Aardvark claims more than 90,000 users and clearly has very promising technology. But I do worry about what Google plans to do with it. Aardvark works well partly due to close integration with Facebook, and Google doesn't seem to be on the social networking company's, ahem, friends list. Google may try to transplant the technology onto one of its own social structures, such as Google Talk. In that case, the company could face some backlash from users, similar to some of the early negative reactions to the automatically generated social networks for Google's new product Buzz.