Yahoo! chief executive Carol Bartz said Wednesday that the pioneering Internet firm would be willing to sell its online search business to Microsoft but only for "boatloads of money."

Bartz's comment came during an onstage interview at an annual All Things Digital technology conference run by The Wall Street Journal in southern California.

"If there's boatloads of money and there's the right technology and there's the right information ... sure," Bartz said when asked about a possible deal with the US computer software giant.

"But you know there's two parties in all of this so the other party has to have a boatload of money," she said. "It's that simple."

She said that talks between Yahoo! and Microsoft are not dead.

Shortly after replacing Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang as chief executive in January, Bartz said that any talks about selling the business to Microsoft would remain private.

"If we're going to negotiate it's as companies negotiate and that is privately," Bartz said in March.

Microsoft tried last year to buy Yahoo! for 47.5 billion dollars in a vain effort to merge online resources to better battle Google, which rules more than 60 percent of the US online search market.

Yahoo!'s share of the market is about 20 percent and Microsoft trails with slightly more than eight percent, according to April figures from industry tracking firms.

"Google is a fierce competitor," Bartz said during her onstage chat Wednesday. "But they don't have the positioning and reach that we have. We are totally different companies. We are a place people come to be informed."