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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."

39 of 301 comments (clear)

  1. Goodbye old friend. by thatkid_2002 · · Score: 5, Funny

    BRB, cancelling my Yahoo! account.

    1. Re:Goodbye old friend. by HouseOfMisterE · · Score: 5, Informative

      Others may joke, but I agree with you. I'll miss them, but goodbye to my.yahoo.com and www.yahoo.com.

    2. Re:Goodbye old friend. by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 4, Funny

      And I had set Yahoo as Firefox's address bar search engine only a few days ago...

    3. Re:Goodbye old friend. by Yvan256 · · Score: 4, Funny

      And my Firefox's address bar search engine was only two days away from retirement!

    4. Re:Goodbye old friend. by LordSnooty · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Which is why a few no name nerds on Slashdot whining about this aren't going to make them care in the least bit.

      Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to "irony".

  2. I just asked Google if it had any reason to worry by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    It said 0 results found.

  3. Moot point by Sporkinum · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yahoo search was useless anyway, so having bing won't change anything for me. It will give them great insight into how people use yahoo's web site though, which will probably allow MSN to poach yahoo users.

    --
    "He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
    1. Re:Moot point by amicusNYCL · · Score: 4, Funny

      So I use M$'s search and its like here's your answer 'dumbass' you should have already know it.

      ...yet something tells me that anyone who refers to Microsoft as "M$" has no problem using something called "The Gimp".

      --
      "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
  4. Google worrying. by pushing-robot · · Score: 5, Informative
    --
    How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
    1. Re:Google worrying. by joe_bruin · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Google worrying. by davester666 · · Score: 5, Funny

      He missed out on the part that one of them gets shot as part of the tying process...

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
  5. Bing... by freedomlinux · · Score: 4, Funny

    Bing will become Yahoo's default search engine.
    I think I just cried a little...

    1. Re:Bing... by Itninja · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yahoo has always been the swinger of the search engine party. For a while it was even powered by Google. When Bing gets old and fat Yahoo will move onto some other nubile young thing.

      --
      I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
  6. Google in trouble? by lordharsha · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Cobbling together 2 inferior technologies doesn't give you a superior one. I don't really think Google has anything to worry about. Kindly take your rabble rousing elsewhere.

    --
    I am, and that is sufficient.
    1. Re:Google in trouble? by Tumbleweed · · Score: 4, Funny

      Cobbling together 2 inferior technologies doesn't give you a superior one.

      Hey, it worked for Reese's!

    2. Re:Google in trouble? by bonch · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Google in trouble? by shish · · Score: 5, Insightful

      such as putting out lots of side products that have little to moderate success

      I can't say I've ever even seen anyone complain about either company doing this o_O What are you talking about, and why is this supposed to be a problem? :S

      attempting to tie branded products together to create one giant platform

      Having a large platform is fine, if it's based on open standards, and people using third party clients and servers aren't shunned

      --
      I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
    4. Re:Google in trouble? by Ihmhi · · Score: 5, Funny

      I don't think the "You got Bing in my Yahoo!" commercial would fly so well. I'm sure someone would misinterpret it.

    5. Re:Google in trouble? by Tumbleweed · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't think the "You got Bing in my Yahoo!" commercial would fly so well. I'm sure someone would misinterpret it.

      I dunno - that kinda sounds like you captured the essence of the business relationship pretty well there.

    6. Re:Google in trouble? by myxiplx · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, but Google are also *not* doing rather a lot of stuff Microsoft did:

      - They're not forcing you to use their products.
      - They don't deliberately break backwards compatibility, using peer pressure to force you to spend more money to upgrade.
      - They're not breaking competing products.

      There's a massive difference between Google and Microsoft. I *choose* to use a vast number of google's products, simply because they are better than anything else out there. I'm *forced* to use Microsoft products, often at great expense, when I would much rather be using alternatives.

    7. Re:Google in trouble? by ukyoCE · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  7. Everybody needs competition by nitroamos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    including Google.

    1. Re:Everybody needs competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      When that competition arrives, I expect to read about it here, today is not that day.

  8. Two wrongs don't make a right... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    But two trains traveling a break-neck speeds towards each other with no sign of stopping makes me feel like throwing some popcorn in the microwave.

  9. Re:I just asked Google if it had any reason to wor by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 4, Funny

    If that's true, it missed the antitrust investigation against them.

  10. Re:Lol... by revlayle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Most people don't "avoid" Bing (except maybe people like on slashdot, which aren't a consumer majority, by a longshot). People do not use Bing because most people have already used Yahoo! and Google for years, most people won't know the difference that much except maybe "hmm it looks a little bit different". If Bing's engine is better than Yahoo!'s, then maybe people will stay with Yahoo! even longer - well, as long as Yahoo can survive that is.

  11. Great by Kamineko · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Some people here are saying that the quality of Bing results is comparable to Google's results in many cases. If we assume that's true, then Yahoo will become exactly like it was several years ago when it was using Google. As a Yahoo service, it'll still be covered in crap, and all that'll do is make people go to Bing, like Yahoo's use of Google lead to folks to use Google ("it's like Yahoo's search, but not crap!"). That'll work wonders for Yahoo. Again.

  12. I don't get it... by Rocketship+Underpant · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Bing isn't really better than Yahoo's search it is? What's more, what about foreign-language searching? Yahoo is the only search engine that has spent significant resources improving their Japanese search results, for example. (Google is beginning to do this, but their search results still suck badly.) I imagine Bing would be a big step backward for most people outside the U.S.

    --
    He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
    1. Re:I don't get it... by JanneM · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
  13. Will Bing get better? by MikeFM · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    1. Re:Will Bing get better? by jonadab · · Score: 4, Interesting

      > 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).

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
    2. Re:Will Bing get better? by xtracto · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
    3. Re:Will Bing get better? by bigman2003 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I disagree about Bing sucking...personally I really like it.

      I like the short 'preview' of the page in the right column. I like the photo search. I like the maps (and the aerial view is MUCH newer where I live than Google.)

      Overall, I think it is a great search engine, and it is a relief to be using something other than Google. It's not like Microsoft is any worse than other companies that have achieved a near monopoly.

      The fact that Bing is my default search engine on Chrome tells the story of how things are changing for the better.

      --
      No reason to lie.
  14. Re:What happened to Cuil by iamapizza · · Score: 3, Funny

    They got slashdotted.

    --
    Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
  15. Re:Well, it was nice while it lasted by StoneCrusher · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Could you please elaborate where Google has "Done More Evil". People questioned the privacy of their searches and they have since stated their privacy terms clearly (years ago). Google has advocated more open format and open source solutions backed with real money and development. They lobby for net neutrality and open access. I really don't see how they are doing evil.

    People have to get used to the idea that if you type information into a website, that website has that information. It's pretty straight forward and there is no way around it. Even if they state they they will delete it, you can't verify that they have and should treat it as such. If you want to remain untrackable from any service, you have to use a proxy; end of story. PS. There isn't a shred of evidence that Google doesn't abide by their terms of service.

    Without a specific grievance, it sounds like you are just rebelling against the popular and successful to make yourself feel special.

  16. Love the Yahoo by mcrbids · · Score: 4, Informative

    You gotta love the Yahoo, if for no other reason than Zimbra. More than any other piece of software, it's the "Exchange Killer" that we've all wondered about. It matches, feature-for-feature, Exchange. It's (mostly) open-source. It runs fine on Linux. It works with Windows, Mac, Linux, KDE, Google Calendars/Email, and just about everything else, including my WinMo phone.

    It's a god-send, it works nicely with basically no fuss or hassle, and it's owned by Yahoo.

    Hey, if Yahoo goes belly up, I just hope they sell Zimbra to somebody who can take the good thing handed to them and DO SOMETHING with it!?!?

    --
    I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
  17. 2 suggestions to new management team by Ilgaz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  18. Re:Anyone tried Bing? by Shados · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  19. Re:Amateurs! Just do a google fight! by SuperIceBoy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yeah, but if you were searching for the bacteria testing kit Google would have failed. Where as yahoo and bing returned both.