Microsoft and Yahoo Search Deal Agreement

[pageoneresults]

---

System: The following 10 messages were cut out of thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/msn_microsoft_search/3961558.htm [webmasterworld.com] by engine - 2:04 pm on July 29, 2009 <small>(utc +1)</small>

---

It's official...

From Microsoft: Microsoft, Yahoo! Change Search Landscape [microsoft.com]
Global Deal Creates Better Choice for Consumers and Advertisers

Yahoo! and Microsoft announced an agreement that will improve the Web search experience for users and advertisers, and deliver sustained innovation to the industry. In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers.

From Yahoo!: Microsoft, Yahoo! Change Search Landscape
Global Deal Creates Better Choice for Consumers and Advertisers
[yhoo.client.shareholder.com...]

[edited by: engine at 1:07 pm (utc) on July 29, 2009]
[edit reason] uri [/edit]

[signor_john]

A HuffPost article mentions that, according to ComScore, Microsoft and Yahoo together handle 28 percent of the U.S. searches, compared to 65 percent for Google. Internationally, Microsoft and Yahoo combined have an 11 percent share of the search market compared to 67 percent for Google. Those numbers make me wonder if MS and Yahoo aren't focusing primarily on the U.S. market and conceding the non-U.S. markets to Google. Certainly they'd have a huge amount of catching up to do on the international front.

[Reno]

For the good of Internet search, someone needs to step in and kill this deal.

My heart tells me you're right about that, but my head tells me that without the deal, it's just a matter of time before Yahoo falls on its sword.

So now we'll have 2 competitors (or should I say 1 and 1/2!) whereas we'd all be better off with about 3 or 4 approximate equals. But that ain't gonna' happen, certainly not in the foreseeable future, so it seems to me we're mostly back to where we started -- rank well with Google or die.

......................

[fargo1999]

Two strong competitors are better for users than one very strong and two weak...

[CainIV]

Done deal. Good to see as far as I am concerned since Bing results to from a purely objective position look a heck of a lot better than Y!

[Automotive site]

What happens if you have good Yahoo rankings and poor Bing?

My understanding is that the two search engines will be amalgamated thus no one is really going to lose their rankings directly as a result of the two companies coming together. Afterall, Bing will now have Around 28% overall market share as opposed to their current of just under 9% because they will take Yahoo's share.

[Automotive site]

"A HuffPost article mentions that, according to ComScore, Microsoft and Yahoo together handle 28 percent of the U.S. searches, compared to 65 percent for Google. Internationally, Microsoft and Yahoo combined have an 11 percent share of the search market compared to 67 percent for Google. Those numbers make me wonder if MS and Yahoo aren't focusing primarily on the U.S. market and conceding the non-U.S. markets to Google. Certainly they'd have a huge amount of catching up to do on the international front."

They would be foolish not to focus internationally. The UK, for example, represents some 17% of Google's overall yearly revenue of over $20B.

[Digmen1]

Does that mean we can get some cheap PC's from Yahoo's search farms ?
I think Firefox has a lot to do with Yahoo's fall. If you install Firefox as your browser which many people are, you sort of end up using Google as your default search engine.
I think Bing and Yahoo will carry on with their steady decline.
As some have said on this thread - will this have anti-trust implications ?

[scout]

Please, please, please MSN be very, very selective on what Yahoo syndication partners you allow into the newly formed network.

[steveb]

"MS jumps to 28% search market share from 8.4% with this deal, that's a lot more eyeballs that'll notice/care."

That doesn't follow logically, and if it did, it means less eyeballs going to Bing and more going/staying at Yahoo. This will help Yahoo's traffic and hurt Bing's, but overall since it will take a thousand years to implement apparently, nobody will notice.

Good question about spidering, and the quality of Yahoo's results in the (long) interim.

[Boulder90]

I love this news. Bing loves my site, Yahoo does not. I'm sure there are other people who have just the exact opposite experience though, which stinks.

[Reno]

From the Wall Street Journal:

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--The new Internet-search venture between Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) is likely to face considerable scrutiny from federal antitrust regulators, according to government officials and analysts.

The Justice Department will look at the deal carefully to be sure it doesn't harm competition by allowing two top Internet companies to team up...

Read Full Story [online.wsj.com]

[smallcompany]

Yahoo! floods a ton of bad traffic through their network that you can't block.

That's the main reason why many people don;t bother about Yahoo's paid search - because of that awful part of it.

For me, between Yahoo and MS - MS wins when about paid search.

[tangor]

There is a possibility of anti-trust inquiry as reported at The Register:

[theregister.co.uk...]

[bill]

Reading through the live blogging of the announcement I got the feeling they knew that there was going to be regulatory scrutiny of this deal. That may be figured into the length of implementation for this deal.

[EvilSaint]

Does this mean Yahoo's Panama could be up for sale soon? ^_^

[MLHmptn]

YAHOO!, or should I say Bada Bing?! See ya Yahoo! Bring on the bing webmaster toolkit MS! Google, are you ready for this?!

[Shaddows]

I can't see regulators blocking two minor players from consolidating. If anything, it increases competition in Search. There is just no way Yahoo and MSFT were going to be serious rivals for Google. Now, Bing is providing excellent results, and has exposure on a site that still draws millions of eyeballs as a portal.

If the rearrangement of Bing SERPs is anything to go by, it appears search depth is improving too.

Two years though?

Also, does Bing get all search patents from Yahoo? Will they get a look at their algo and pick and choose bits they want to integrate?

[benevolent001]

As this deal has been finalized i wonder what will happen to engineers which were working on yahoo search technology , team of yahoo which was working on webmaster tools , advertising network?

[signor_john]

I can't see regulators blocking two minor players from consolidating. If anything, it increases competition in Search.

But it decreases competition for search advertising. IMHO, that's the real antitrust issue.

[lfgoal]

"MS jumps to 28% search market share from 8.4% with this deal, that's a lot more eyeballs that'll notice/care."

Yeah, but 99 percent of all users won't know that yahoo results are being supplied by ms. Better bing search results may enhance yahoo's perception as a google competitor and, ultimately, make it more of a threat to MS in the long. Who's really the predator and who's the prey?

[mrguy]

I anticipate this deal will go through with no problem because a Bing/Yahoo deal does not decrease competition for the advertising. MSN doesn't have enough of the pie to make a dent to start with.

It will however force Google to rethink their stupid QS slaps because now you will have an alternative.

This will be better for advertisers.

[fashezee]

When will the Bing Algo start running on Yahoo?
I heard something like 18 months?

[MLHmptn]

It can't be soon enough I tell ya! :)

[newborn]

The real question is when will we see Yahoo pushing out Bind search results. How Bing ranks websites is really out of whack. There is no clear definition and the clutter is just too much.

In my opinion the weak search results that Bing offers will lead people to just "Google It".

Then Yahoo will lose traffic and people using the search function. So what about Email and all other aspects, is the company going to continue to run on its own?

[Reno]

In my opinion the weak search results that Bing offers will lead people to just "Google It"

Which increases Google's dominance and thus makes all of us that much dependent on them. I'm hoping that the very best software engineers at Yahoo are being told that their positions are assured and, along with the very best from MS/bing, will manage to put together a world class service that at the very least holds it own.

In addition, it seems to me that G should hope for the same thing (a "30% competitor"), because if they gain too much more of a grip on search, who's to say the Feds would not move to break them into a couple different companies. Sound silly? Ask the old-timers at Ma Bell...

.........................

[mrguy]

In my opinion the weak search results that Bing offers will lead people to just "Google It".

That's odd, because in the things I'm searching for, its googles results that are driving me to bing it since the google results are junk.

Bing doesn't show crappy adsense geocities sites with nothing but links yet Google sure loves them.

The fact is, if the average searcher started using bing and never used anything else, then they would never have a reason to try google, contrary to google users suddenly finding the junk in the google results are not what they want so to find what they want they try bing.

Google is no longer the Gospel according to search and the sooner the PHDs ego in the plex deflate and they pull their heads out of their rear ends, the better off the results will be. I welcome their demise and hope to see them sink fast.

[Reno]

Google is no longer the Gospel according to search

For the first time in years that is thankfully true.

BTW, I did not mean to imply by my previous posting that I agreed with the "weak search results that Bing offers" quote -- in fact, I'd earlier added another thread in this MS/bing forum in which I state my surprise at the number of visitors bing is delivering to our sites.

I think MS is on the right track (finally). Now, let's hope they don't ruin it by going the same route as Google, which is to say, finding every reason under the sun to penalize a site.

I'm not so naive as to think that a top level cutting edge search engine is anything other than extraordinarily complex, but the goal is actually pretty straightforward -- deliver to the user the results that best fulfills their query. Google went into the stratosphere because they did that for the first few years, but then they evolved into their ridiculous "punishment phase" where a perfectly good site could be knocked down because someone had done something as simple as linking to a "bad neighborhood". I posted a long time ago -- punish the page, not the site. The G rep (Adam) answered by saying they don't target individual pages, that penalties apply to full sites. Let's hope bing does not fall into that trap.

......................

[BillyS]

I really don't know what the excitement is all about. Bing isn't gaining market share by beating Google, they're buying Yahoo. There aren't any synergies in this deal. It's a simple 3 + 2 = 2.

Google should be happy that MS has eliminated Y as a threat... All they have to worry about now is a search engine that managed to gain a whopping 8% of search in four years...

[amznVibe]

Microsoft plans to lose $300 Million in the first two years, then make $400M a year:

[blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com...]

[ichthyous]

I find that Bing is nor improvement whatsoever over the old MSN search, and far worse results than Yahoo search, not to mention Google. I think this deal gives people fewer search options and will potentially drive more people to Google once they see how awful Bing's results are