The tie-up, inked late last week, will give the daily 50 million-and-odd users of Yahoo.com access to rates of stocks traded on the country's largest stock exchange.

The next stage would involve a linkage between the NSE's web site (NSE.Co.In) and Yahoo.com. As per this linkage, a user could at the click of the mouse be directed to the NSE web site, which averages 4 lakh hits per day.

To start with, Yahoo will access the quotes from Reuters but the NSE will soon install a server at Videsh Sanchar Nigam, through which Yahoo and other such search engines can directly access the NSE's quotes.

"Even though we are fairly popular in India, the number of people abroad who are aware of the NSE web site are not many. Through Yahoo, we will be ableto reach out to anyone anywhere in the world interested in the Indian stock markets," said NSE managing director RH Patil.

"The fact that Yahoo has agreed to host our quotes on a real-time basis shows that there is tremendous interest abroad in the Indian equity markets," he added.

"This is going to be the norm tomorrow, and we are gearing up to utilise the Net to the best of our ability to make life that much more easier for investors in our exchange," Patil said.

Patil has been at the forefront of the technological development of the exchange, which has one of the largest networks in the world, spread across 245 cities and towns.

The NSE launched its web site last year. It has recently forged linkages with the web site of the National Securities Depository Ltd, through which the concept of the depository could be popularised in India. The depository itself has linked up with more than 13 depositories in the world so that international trends and practices could be accessed by Indianinvestors.