Denver Web Development – Unleaded Group

08.06.2009

Microsoft, Yahoo reach search agreement on Bing, perhaps Because It’s Not Google

DENVER, CO – JULY 30, 2009 – The news this week that Microsoft and Yahoo have finally reached an agreement – any agreement – on an Internet search partnership, this time involving Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, should bring a much-need shakeup in the web search and SEO world and should, ultimately – no matter how it plays out for market share – benefit web operators.

The deal is clearly aimed at fighting the search engine dominance of Google, which handles 65 percent of U.S. Internet search traffic and as much of 67 percent of such traffic in the rest of the world. Indeed, many Internet observers have speculated that Bing is an acronym for “Bing Is Not Google,” or perhaps “Because It’s Not Google.” Microsoft, through Bing and its predecessors, has about 20 percent of the search market, and Yahoo has about 8 percent on its own, giving the new combination 28 percent of search market share at current measurements. 

Microsoft and Yahoo have been trying for years to forge a partnership on something, even going so far as having Microsoft bid $47.5 billion to buy Yahoo last year, only to have Yahoo shareholders turn the deal down. Too bad; of late the market value on Yahoo is at about $22 billion. But this latest deal shows promise for both companies and, in the process, for the Internet as a whole.

The new, 10-year deal should commence early next year in the U.S. and around the world over the next two years, pending regulatory review of antitrust considerations, and the two companies said it may take up to two years to reconcile the technologies of the two platforms. The deal will place Microsoft’s Bing as the dominant search engine on Yahoo, with Yahoo reaping 88 percent of the advertising revenue from all ads that run alongside of search results for the first five years. Microsoft paid nothing up front for the latest arrangement; last year the firm offered Yahoo $1 billion in cash and $8 billion in stock in return for a search partnership, a deal which was rebuffed by then Yahoo CEO and founder Jerry Yang.

Bing was launched in early June by Microsoft, replacing its most recent search engine Live Search, previously known as Windows Live Search. Calling the new search-engine entrant a “Decision Engine,” Microsoft has earmarked as much as $100 million in advertising to market Bing, and thus far, after nearly two months on the market, it has been receiving mostly positive reviews and has been picking up slightly more traffic. Bing will continue to be marketed separately from Yahoo, and apparently the only Bing branding that will appear on the Yahoo site will be at the bottom of a Yahoo search page.

Ironically, Microsoft might be taking a page out of the Google playbook by forging an alliance with Yahoo. In its infancy, while Yahoo struggled to find its way with a search engine, it used a then little-know company called Google to perform its search, thus helping launch the behemoth. That alliance ended in 2002, and Yahoo has tried several other search partnerships and in-house search strategies to limited success in the meantime. 

There are other search engines in the marketplace, of course, but most have seen limited success. Last year the Cuil (pronounced “cool”) search engine launched to some fanfare, but lately it has seen its traffic diminish and currently has something like 1 percent of search traffic. And just yesterday another entrant came into the search market, Yobel.com, so it’s clear that more than Yahoo and Microsoft think that Google is vulnerable.

One of the neat features of Bing that people reviews have been touting is a mouse-over preview of each search result which allows the searcher to read into the entry without the need of clicking through and discovering it is not the result one was looking for. What’s interesting in the feature is that more words, more text, can be displayed on the search results page than is typical with Google, a move that may just shakeup the search analytics that have evolved over the past few years. Indeed, there are reports circulating in the blogs and tech magazines that, in an unusual event, very senior management of Google have contact their own rank-and-file engineers with the admonition to look at Bing specifically, and the Bing/Yahoo deal in general, and react.

“While SEO analytics and the demands of the search engines do change, ever slightly, on a regular basis, Bing and the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership are probably going to herald more sweeping changes in search engine protocol than we’ve ever seen,” said Jarod Clark, President of Denver-based Unleaded Software, a website design, development and SEO firm. “We’re talking with our clients, watching the SEO results, and preparing ourselves and clients for what we expect to be new opportunities in SEO.”