Yahoo! Inc. had its first profit increase in two years because of a gain from a stake in Alibaba.com Ltd., results that may fail to persuade investors to reject Microsoft Corp.’s $44.6 billion takeover offer.

Yahoo, owner of the second most popular Internet search engine, said first-quarter net income rose to $542.2 million, or 37 cents a share, helped by a $401 million gain from the initial public offering of China’s Alibaba.com. The company’s forecast for the current quarter was in line with analysts’ estimates.

The earnings didn’t spur much enthusiasm from investors looking for the chief executive officer of Yahoo, Jerry Yang, to put up numbers high enough to squeeze a better offer from Microsoft. Yahoo shares fell after the report. Microsoft has threatened a proxy fight and perhaps a lower price if Yahoo doesn’t agree to a deal by this weekend.

“The board should take that money and run,” an analyst at LR Burtschy & Co. in Charleston, S.C., Paul Meeks, said in a Bloomberg Radio interview. “They needed to show fabulous results and these are good results. I don’t know if they’re what’s necessary to prove to investors they can go it alone.”

Sales, excluding revenue passed on to partner sites, rose 14% to $1.35 billion, topping analysts’ average estimate. Excluding the gain and the cost of stock options, profit of 11 cents a share beat projections. Net income a year earlier was $142.4 million, or 10 cents, Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo said in a statement today.