Microsoft, Yahoo Finalize Search Agreement

Joe Quimby writes "Microsoft and Yahoo have finalized and executed their Web-search agreement after five months of deliberation, the companies announced Friday. Microsoft and Yahoo reached a revenue-sharing agreement in July to combine their search businesses. Under the 10-year agreement, Yahoo's Web search would be powered by Bing and Yahoo would retain most ad revenue from its site."

Comments

10 years is a LOOOOOOOOONG time...

[Anonymous Coward]

10 years is a very long time in the Internet world. After all, Google has only existed just slightly longer than 10 years, and look at all it has done in that time.

It seems very absurd to make a deal for that long. Although it gets much traffic, Yahoo! itself is barely relevant today, and Bing hasn't exactly been shown to be a challenger to Google's search results.

Microsoft monoculture

[Weaselmancer]

Yahoo's Web search would be powered by Bing

One of the advantages of having several search sites is that if one site doesn't find what you're looking for, another site might. That's why it makes sense to have multiple search engines. Now there is no point in going to Yahoo if Microsoft can't find it. Same engine - same results.

Two irrelevants joining will remain irrelevant

[LibrePensador]

Yahoo by making itself technologically dependent on Microsoft for 10 years has given up on search. This effectively puts Yahoo out of business. It's a golden parachute for Yahoo's executives but jeopardizes any chances that Yahoo will ever be able to play in the search business again.

As for Microsoft, it allows microsoft to gain instantly a few percentage points in web search, which should allow them to extract higher ad fees.

Microsoft is patient and they hope that they are buying 10 years with which to figure out how to bring down Google. They have enough money, but when it comes to the web, I think Microsoft is largely irrelevant.

If it wasn't for their desktop monopoly, nobody would even care about anything LIVE. They shove that stuff down users throat every time a user tries to download messenger, which they are only interested in because of the network effects that allowed Messenger to become relevant in the first place. I remember when no one even knew what messenger was and people hated it initially, but it kept popping up after every single XP install and telling people that they needed an account and enough people fell for this crap.

Only another Google-like startup could outgoogle google, but it certainly won't be Microsoft or Microsoft and Yahoo's dead skeleton.

Re:Two irrelevants joining will remain irrelevant

[Etherized]

Indeed, it buys them time. How much time, I'm not sure about.

Clearly, Yahoo! has decided that they simply can't compete on search. Why not let MS chase google, they figure, and take a cut for simply lending them the Yahoo! name. In the meantime, that removes a lot of search related R&D and infrastructure headcount, and they can free up those resources to chase the next big thing (well, or lay them off).

This is a desperate move, though. It only works out if people continue to use Yahoo! branded Bing search, and it's unclear to me why anybody would do so. Yahoo! needs to find some kind of value add that lures people to use their Bing frontend, otherwise this deal buys them months, not years. Indeed, this is why it's such a good move from MS - it gradually migrates people to Bing and kills off the Yahoo! brand, without them having to buy Yahoo! and shut them down directly. There's always the *chance* that Yahoo! will recover, but I'm sure MS is assuming that they won't.

Re:Two irrelevants joining will remain irrelevant

[Trepidity]

Yahoo does have some built-in market share that'll let them struggle on for a while as long as their search isn't terrible, which is what they might be hoping for from the Bing backend. They have huge installed bases of users of lots of their other services (email, mailing lists, now Flickr), and the Yahoo search bar shows up at the top of the page for some of those services (though not, at least for now, on Flickr)--- check out the top of the Yahoo Groups page, for example. If they can keep those services all steady with reasonably large user bases, they'll have a decent stream of search users even if nobody purposely goes to search.yahoo.com.

Re:Have I misunderstood

[onefriedrice]

Is this some way Microsoft have found of getting round anti trust by setting the default search in IE to Yahoo not Bing thereby avoiding the accusation that they are yet again trying to illegally leverage a monopoly in one area to create one in another ?

I don't think the default search engine in IE has ever been an antitrust issue that anyone has ever cared about. But now that they're partnering with Yahoo, let's make it seem like it is? You do those of us who don't use Microsoft products a disfavor by trying to turn everything into some sort of evidence that Microsoft is the spawn of evil. They do enough unethical things that we don't need to cheapen our position by trying to fabricate more. You make our side seem desperate and irrational, and believe me we're not.

Re:Oh dear no

[Tim C]

The point I think is that it's a huge amount of data for one company to have on each person to use not only its services, but to visit any website that uses its ad services.

Google may not be evil *now*, but will that be true of the next management team, or the one after that?

Someone needs to tell Ballmer

[Flipao]

That while they were so busy spending billions to scrape a few points in market share back, Google were busy making sure they were the default search engine in the most popular mobile devices for the next 10 years: Android and the iPhone, Microsoft's mobile platform is all but dead in the water, and even then, devices like HTC's Windows Mobile smartphones also default to Google.

They're so busy catching up they have no idea what beyond the next corner.