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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]
Microsoft's search engine will power the Yahoo website and Yahoo will in turn become the advertising sales team for Microsoft's online offering.
[news.bbc.co.uk...]
I wonder how quickly changes will roll out on Yahoo.
It is for 10 years.
Yahoo will get 88 percent of search revenue created by its sites during the first five years, while Microsoft will guarantee a certain level of search revenue for 18 months in each country. The companies expect it will take about two years after the deal is approved to fully get the partnership up and running.
[news.cnet.com...]
I wonder how quickly changes will roll out on Yahoo.
...and when they do roll it out, will anyone outside of the industry actually notice/care?
That to me seems like Yahoo! will be running the ad platform which is bad news in my opinion. Yahoo! floods a ton of bad traffic through their network that you can't block. Bing traffic would just get dilluted within the garbage sites. At least with MSN Adcenter, you could specify that you only wanted ads to appear on Bing.
A 10-year agreement is huge. MS is in for the long-term. Google now has a fight on its hands. (I doubt they are surprised about this.)
All in all, this should be good news for independent webmasters and smaller online businesses. My hope is real competition will keep more gates open and prices somewhat under control. At the same time, if you focused mostly on G (and I am guilty as anyone of this), it's time to grow up.
Microsoft's Bing search engine will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search technology for Yahoo's sites, while Yahoo will be responsible for selling premium search ads for both companies.
Sounds good to me. It was about time Yahoo gave up. Just too bad it will take so long to implement.
Bones, also keep in mind that Y is powering a lot of local search via newspapers. Yes, MANY people will notice.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see some healthy competition here.
We rank really well on Yahoo/Bing, but even ranking relatively poorly in comparison on Google still sends us 3 times as much traffic as Y/B combined.
When your average Joe searches Yahoo in future, will he think "oooh, these 10 results look really new and different, I must tell all my friends about this"? Or will he just think they look like 10 results that he would've got had he used any search engine and effectively NOT notice the change?
Is a Yahoo/Bing tie up enough to lure Google users away? Or will those Google users still just keep on Googling and Yahoo and Bing users still keep on Yahooing and Bingoing?
I'm not convinced at present, but time will tell and hopefully I'll be proved wrong and we'll see some healthy competition that drives search forward.
The companies expect it will take about two years after the deal is approved to fully get the partnership up and running.
This will eliminate already sparse compeition. It will allow MSN to set the stage for their benefit giving advertisers only one other search option.
Also, its going to give less viewable options for people conducting searches. This deal smells bad.
Expect profit margins to decrease over time due to this deal.
What does this mean for advertisers who do really well with yahoo paid search?
I'd assume that it would increase rates and advertiser competition across the board. Instead of 5 people biding on a term on Bing and 5 on Yahoo!, you combine them and go to 10 people bidding on a term. You are exposed to a wider audience but your clicks will cost more.
Less options for advertisers = higher bid prices. There is no avoiding this equation. Hopefully the deal gets nixed due to anti-trust laws.
I recommend contacting your state representative to let them know how you feel about this deal.
how can they afford taking two years to get the partnership up and running and still expect to compete?
Two years? Just when you start thinking there’s some hope here for positive change.
Two years? Thats a life time when it comes to this medium!
It’s no wonder their both getting their asses kicked by Google.
On the publisher side - if, like me, you had a hard time getting into YPN (could never convince them I wasn't *selling* fireworks) but managed to get into the adCenter publisher program - this is great news. You will have an alternative to AdSense that has a chance of actually earning. I *love* the adCenter publisher options, but the ad inventory (specially for locally targeted stuff) was really awful.
On the advertiser side of it, I see it as a plus too. adCenter can be a little more stringent on the quality side (not a concern for me) which helps keep some of the riff raff out, and they have MUCH better tools for managing campaigns. I'd pulled my clients out of Yahoo because of their terms and conditions, and pulled them out of adCenter because the reach was so small, and *both* programs were way too time consuming to deal with compared to the return. But now adCenter has a desktop manager, and Panama will be out of the picture, so I anticipate putting everyone back in.
I wonder when/if Yahoo will cease to crawl the web.
Thats a very interesting question with lots of ramifications.
Bing missed many many sites when I am doing research. I use Yahoo to find them instead of Google because Google cuts off my result depth more and more.
So I guess that avenue is gone.
Does anyone know when they are planning to "flip the switch" ?
No mention of an effective date in the press releases.
(update: oh I see, two years, so no worries)
Doesn't this have to be approved by the FTC or something?
Looking out the window down toward Silicon Valley to see if I can spot any golden parachutes being deployed near Yahoo's campus...
Yahoo is still trying to spider a RSS feed on one of our sites that was 404'd in 2003.
MS kept making bluffs and position bids at Yahoo while slowly chipping away at their stack (er. stock) just waiting until they got dealt a BING.
Once MS played their BING card Yahoo quickly folded.
