It was announced this week that Microsoft and Yahoo have finally found a way to make a partnership work.
Both companies have been involved in the search engine market almost from its conception and for a long time ruled the roost (with Yahoo widely regarded as the better of the two). Then an upstart called Google appeared almost overnight and well and truly pulled the rug out from under the competition.
Yahoo was rapidly becoming a lifestyle portal and MSN suffered from a level of distrust due to its parent corporation. This wasn’t a problem when there wasnt any credible competition. Or if there was, like Altavista, then the easy option was to buy them.
Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo several times and each time Yahoo blocked the takeover. In the meantime Google continued to get stronger. Its no nonsense approach and praiseworthy search results (based on the simple idea of actually looking at the content of the site rather than the hidden meta tags) meant that today it accounts for more than 3/4 of all searches carried out in the English speaking world.
So in what may well be a last ditch attempt at fighting Google, Yahoo will be using Microsoft’s Bing engine and Microsoft’s online advertising will be handled by Yahoo.
Bing launched a couple of months ago to little fanfare and general apathy. So draw your own conclusions as to how successful this partnership will be…
So instead of BingHoo (my catchy new name for the child of this unholy alliance) it may well be that in 12 months we will be saying Bing who?
(logos and images used remain the copyright of the original owner – and hopefully wont get me sued!)
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As an interesting footnote the word within the industry is that this may well be a bad move for Yahoo and is unlikely to result in a greater market share as Yahoo users were already using a different engine to Google and Bing already existed and hadn’t drawn any of Google’s users in.
Since the announcement Yahoo’s share price has plummeted…