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Yahoo's (YHOO) taken a detour with its auto Web site that it says puts it on the right road.

The Web portal this month will start using an outside company - Dealix - to provide auto dealer price quotes on new cars, via Yahoo Autos.

Yahoo had done this in-house, but the company is reorganizing to focus on its strengths.

'The buying and selling of new-car leads is not something we are going to define ourselves by,' said Damon Cronkey, regional business lead in North America for Yahoo Autos.

Yahoo is making the change after Chief Executive Carol Bartz said the company would look to revamp, shut down or outsource some services. Bartz made the comment at Yahoo's annual shareholder meeting on June 25.

The edict is clear, Cronkey says.

'Carol's message is about prioritization,' he said. 'She wants us to focus on things that we are best-of-breed in, and look for partners for things that they are best-of-breed in.'

Also, he says more site visitors are interested in used cars than new. 'We see a lot more activity around the used-car section of our site, so we have been programming our site more for consumers interested in used cars,' he said.

Dealix, a unit of the Cobalt Group, an auto marketing services company, has relationships with more than 4,000 independent car dealers.

It also works with dealerships owned by carmakers.

For Yahoo, Dealix will power a service called 'Get a Free New Car Quote.' Up to four dealers can respond.

Yahoo will continue to use another service, by Cars.com, that provides lists of cars for sale on dealer lots.

In April, Dealix signed a similar pact with Time Warner's (TWX) AOL Web portal. It powers the new-car referral service at AOL Autos. And last year, Dealix began providing the same service to Microsoft's (MSFT) MSN Autos site.

Before adding Dealix, Yahoo had to maintain relationships with thousands of new-car dealers. It also had to make sure dealers paid Yahoo each time a visitor to Yahoo Autos sent a request about a specific car.

'Yahoo's recent revamp required a new game plan,' says Anna Zornosa, general manager of Dealix.

'In this economy every company is thinking more specifically about their core competencies, and Web portals are thinking about how to serve millions of customers news and e-mail and social networking services,' she said. 'The economy forces everyone to think very specifically.'

Outsourcing new-car referrals to Dealix is just a small part of Yahoo's much larger retrenching, says Peter Krasilovsky, an analyst for the Kelsey Group, a research firm.

'Yahoo is reorganizing,' he said. 'They're trying to figure out their strengths.

'Running around to thousands of car dealers to solicit quote information is not as economic as working with a third party like Dealix.'

Unlike Yahoo, AOL has always outsourced new-car referrals.

It had used Autobytel (ABTL) for this before switching to Dealix this year.

Taking new-car referrals in-house was never part of AOL's game plan, says Doug Eddy, director of AOL Autos.

'The thing that is important for us is that working with a back-end provider such as Dealix allows us to work more on the front-end experience that we are building for consumers,' he said.