Microsoft and Yahoo Reach Deal

e9th writes "We know that Microsoft failed last February in its attempt to buy Yahoo. Now, Advertising Age reports that they've reached a deal. Instead of a buyout, the two will enter into a revenue sharing agreement, and Bing will become Yahoo's default search engine. The meat of the AdAge article can be found in Yahoo News. This deal may give Google something to worry about."

Comments

Re:Google worrying.

[joe_bruin]

I recall Fake Steve Jobs had some rather insightful thoughts on this.

The Borg-Yahoo merger won't work. Here's why. It's like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they'll run faster.

Re:Google in trouble?

[bonch]

It's interesting how people side with Google on this site, even though they're guilty of many of the things people complain about Microsoft doing, such as putting out lots of side products that have little to moderate success, attempting to tie branded products together to create one giant platform, and collecting data on users. Merely suggesting a competitor could actually make Google worry about something is even labeled rabble rousing.

Will Bing get better?

[MikeFM]

Have you used Bing? It kind of sucks. I can only hope it gets better but I don't know - lots of people complain it won't index their websites although I've had no trouble in that area.

Or maybe I just search for things it isn't good at - things I want to buy and documentation mostly. The most amusing was the other day when I tried looking up information about Bing's spiders (that behave oddly - not always following robots.txt and changing their user agent to look like IE). Couldn't find a thing on Bing but Google found it right away. Conspiracy to hide the information or suckage?

That's another interesting point. Why is Bing hitting my site again and again and making it look like real users using simple one word searches but all from the Bing IP block? When I try to use the same searches to find the same pages I don't see my site come up. Hmmm. Either way it's easier for webmasters if everyone just licenses one or two major search engines (Google and Bing) so that you only have to optimize your content to be listed high on them. It's hard when they all work different and sometimes in conflicting ways.

Re:Will Bing get better?

[jonadab]

> Conspiracy to hide the information or suckage?

The latter, probably caused by the well-known fact that Microsoft is strongly focused on non-technical users. Obviously technical information about search-engine indexing practices isn't the sort of thing most end users would search for, so Microsoft doesn't care whether it works well or not.

If they wanted to *hide* the information, they'd try to keep it out of the search engines that people who *would* look for such information are most likely to use, chiefly Google. In the absence of any evidence that they've attempted that, I would tend to discount the notion that the poor results in Bing are a deliberate obfuscation, in favor of the more likely explanation that they just don't care whether it's any good at turning up technical information.

If you search on Bing for DateTime module, the docs for the Perl and Python DateTime modules do show up, but at #4 and #2, respectively. The same search on Google, predictably, turns them up at #2 and #1. Of course, anyone who actually uses Perl would go straight to search.cpan.org (personally, I have a bookmark keyword for it), and I suspect the Python community has something similar (at least, I would hope so). Nonetheless, Bing's relevancy ranking isn't putting the canonical information first, and Google's is.

I tried searching for Encyclopedia, and the top four results are encyclopedia.com (never heard of it, but it does appear to be relevant, albeit not great; I looked up mitosis in it and got eight paragraphs from Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, which is a pretty meager article for such a major topic, but it would be enough for most gradeschool reports), the Wikipedia article on Encyclopedia, the Britannica main page, and the English Wikipedia main page, in that order. So again, the two that obviously ought to be in the top four results are there. Actually, I tried the same thing on Google, and its ranking is just about the same (with, again, encyclopedia.com in the top slot; I have no idea why, unless having the search term in the domain name is a major boost).

Re:Will Bing get better?

[xtracto]

you used Bing? It kind of sucks. I can only hope it gets better but I don't know - lots of people complain it won't index their websites although I've had no trouble in that area.

Yep, I have used it. I like the maps.bing.com feature of "bird's eye view" which makes it easier to recognize a place I am going to before being there.

Also, I have lately been using it in place of Google search to avoid the miriads of spam sites (say, if you want to find *that* video in Rapidshare, or *that* hardware driver for win xp). One of the advantages of Bing (for now at least) is that it has not been invaded with "search optimized" crap sites.

Re:I don't get it...

[JanneM]

Agree on this. Yahoo is much better than Google for Japanese language search (and Google translate is a sad joke for Japanese; even when I take the time to read through the Japanese original I can often still not make sense of the English "translation"). There's going to be a lot of unhappy people here if they manage to bork that up.

2 suggestions to new management team

[Ilgaz]

Open Firefox in your 30 inch presentation monitors. Let it open 2 windows and put them next to each other on desktop both showing same time.

Now, open these addresses.
http://adwords.google.com/
http://advertising.yahoo.com/ (I don't even KNOW live.com advertising url)

Act like you are a little company wanting to advertise your product and compare them, especially international language support.

I don't like Google, its policies etc. but there is a fact that they don't have competitor at all. Not because they send a secret signal to advertiser brains, their advertising system is way better that is all.

Want to compete? My nr1 suggestion would be "quality control" of ads. Give users chance to click "spam" in advertising or some sort of "thumbs down" scheme, use the already included MCafee siteadvisor for ads etc. E.g. there is no way to prevent Scientology advertising attack on Slashdot. If there was a tiny button like "spam" or "off topic", I would click it and have the really mattering ads show. It is not something can be done by Google or Slashdot.

For a long time, I don't click to software "want to download ...., click here?" ads too. I don't trust them, I go to site itself or a trusted, edited download site. That is where my "mcafee siteadvisor" idea comes from.

Re:Anyone tried Bing?

[Shados]

Bing is actually decent, as a first "serious" attempt at taking on Google. The search results are not as good as Google's (then again, Google's have been going gradually down, too), but it has a lot of nice features to allow you to filter and narrow down common types of searches, like restaurant searches by price, or finding good stores to buy something.

The drawback? If you're anywhere except the US, then it sucks. Hard. Search results are awfully bad, and all the nifty features that makes it different from Google are gone. I almost suspect that for non-US countries, Bing is just a skin over Windows Live Search, because its really night and day compared to US Bing.

End result: if you're in the US, give it a shot...regular search won't be as good, but many types of searches will have tools to assist you, bringing it up a notch. If you're not in the US, don't even try.

Re:Google in trouble?

[ukyoCE]

Microsoft has a monopoly in the OS market which has resulted in (some) software being written only for Windows, which is then required to participate in certain work or play sectors of the market.

Microsoft has a monopoly on Office software by using closed formats which prevent competing software from participating (in any meaningful way) in the Office software market. Good luck going into work and saying "Hey Boss, go ahead and save $200 and get me OpenOffice instead of MS Office".

Microsoft has bundled numerous applications into its monopoly Operating System for the purpose of extinguishing competition in additional markets. Products such as Internet Explorer, MSN Messenger, Outlook Express have taken huge chunks of their respective markets, or destroyed the market entirely.

This is because Microsoft is able to "give it away" by charging every user of a Microsoft OS for the development of those products, and automatically distributing those products to "every" (90%+) new computer.

I don't have a choice of whether to use MSN Messenger. I have to, because it comes on all of the computers at work, and thus that is what everyone at work uses to communicate.

No one uses Eudora anymore, because Outlook Express is bundled with Windows and has the same functionality. Eudora, on the other hand, has to pay their employees somehow.

Microsoft is in a unique scenario compared to Google, Linux, or Mac because of their OS monopoly. Even if you try to argue Google has a monopoly on something (Search? Advertising?), they haven't abused it to compete unfairly in other markets.

If I had the choice to use superior products instead of using Microsofts' products, I would. I do not have that choice.