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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."

28 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!

  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. 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. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.