Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal Gets Go-Ahead From EU, US DoJ
CWmike writes "Microsoft and Yahoo announced Thursday morning that the US DOJ and the European Commission have approved an agreement between the two firms to have the Bing search engine power Yahoo's sites. The companies said that engineers will begin adapting Bing for the Yahoo site 'in the coming days' and that they hope work is completed, at least the US, by the end of this year."
I think I support this... I mean, Yahoo and Microsoft of course both suck, but Google needs some legitimate competition in the search market...
So will this make Yahoo suck like Bing, or Bing actually find pages (I'm interested in) just like Yahoo?
Every time I've used Bing, I've been disappointed.
Yahoo and Bing?
Now I can ignore both at the same time!
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
SLASH failed again. Explanation: this story is tagged "search", and the link to the left of "read more" on this story entry as appeared in the front page shows up as "search.slashdot.org" which is the domain name part of the story's url, which is semantically wrong. (There's no /. section called "Search". That domain should have been hosting the search tool for /. or whatever, but has deformed into a monster of a search page and an index of stories tagged "search", unlike other sections e.g. apple.slashdot.org, which just shows a clean sub-index similar to the index page.)
And this is clearly yet another sign of /. being eaten up by kipples.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
That's ironic. Just today Firefox on Ubuntu (Lucid) was updated to default to Yahoo search...
Hope and change... meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
I can't imagine any scenario where this benefits the market. I lean heavily toward free market economics, but one area where the government *must* exercise control is in creating more competition, not less.
I think if I were king, I'd pass a law that any market must have at least 3 or 4 strong players, otherwise it's monopoly bustin' time.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
FTA
"I believe that together, Microsoft and Yahoo will promote more choice, better value and greater innovation to our customers, as well as to advertisers and publishers."
Wait, Two companies combining forces, eliminating the better search engine(IMHO) and then we're told this will result in "more choice"?
I really don't understand how this could be, but I won't use Yahoo (a mediocre SE. at best) anymore. For me it means less choice.
search engine to submit URLs for indexing?
*Does happy dance*
Google wanted to infuse Yahoo with money to keep them afloat with a search deal. It was immediately killed as an anti-trust violation, and they threatened Google with the possibility of breaking them up if they attempted something like that again.
So Microsoft infuses Yahoo with money in a search deal and it is approved.
I know Google has a larger market share than Yahoo, but which of the two companies has been anti-competitive in their business practices?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Yahoo users.
I gave it a shot for a month and I found I just wasn't satisfied with it. It didn't have the simplicity Google offered in Search and many times I'd find myself going back to Google.
The biggest notable area I had to keep going back to Google was actually searching Technet and MSDN for articles. I was finding one or two keywords would into Google would give me the correct page I was looking for while Bing would give me completley useless results.
you've been a big part of the internet for many people but as many partnerships like this in the past, you just don't walk away from a deal with Microsoft. It's like that giant slug thing in Stormship Troopers where they suck out your brain thinking it'll make them smarter. It doesn't work but it does kill you. It's been good to know you Yahoo and I hope Mr Icahn is happy knowing he handed you to Microsoft.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
So Lucid users can look forward to using Bing as the default search engine.
The haters without information are out tonight!
Seems like it will give MS more time to develop Bing by padding its' market share with Yahoo traffic.
One thing I'd really like to see is how many people who have switched from mostly using Google to mostly using Bing.
...besides throw-away e-mail accounts?
Seriously, the last time I used Yahoo search was in 1998. I remember because I had just started a new job and was trying to get the dumb bastards to remove ancient erroneous links in their directory (or whatever the fuck it was called) that were causing my new company big headaches. I did not succeed, but people stopped using that hideous thing and the problem went away.
Yahoo's motto at the time must have been "as dynamic as hard-set concrete".
I tried their search (powered by "Your Name Here") a few times and it sucked rocks. End of Yahoo for me. Even stale old Alta Vista was better. A few months later, Google arrived and I never looked back.
I did use the Swedish one, er .... oh, yeah, Alltheweb as a backup to Google for the first few Google years, but then Yahoo sucked Alltheweb (and others) it into its vacuum bag and turned them uniformly shitty.
IMO, association with Yahoo is the kiss of death for search engines. Lets hope it keeps its record intact. I think Google needs competition, but from someone innovative, not from the joint efforts of a couple of tired old whores.
Its sad to see yahoo going down like this. It really had some excellent services and i will miss many of them. With the Google agreement they would have had a chance of surviving and even grow but now i give them at most a couple of years. Icahn must have some reverse Midas touch where things he gets involved in turns to shit.
HTTP/1.1 400
It is the Windows 95 equivalent of search engines..it looked good when it first came out, then people tried to use it. CRASH! You try to look up Winter Olympics, you get ticket prices, or "live" feeds that updated yesterday, not really what you are looking for. There are sometimes that you don't need "answers not links". I need links for sources, I don't want or need you Bing. I will stick to Google, or--God help me--ask.com if I must.
and:
with these kind of glacial speeds of development... and they wonder why the mighty Google is trouncing them?
What about now Canonical? Will you change the default search engine of Lucid from Yahoo to something better?
Canonical now is also helping Microsoft. Great!
_http://lifehacker.com/5458113/ubuntus-default-search-engine-switching-to-yahoo
I run a small-medium sized web site that targets K-12 teachers. We started out small with very targeted ads, advertising on Google with a budget of $10/day and started making decent sales. We were doing so well that we decided to try Yahoo. We used the exact same ads and the exact same keywords as the ones for Google that were doing well. We put $100 in our Yahoo ads account to start with, and burned through the whole amount in 4 days without a single sale. Needless to say, we turned it off immediately and have never tried it again. Now we are making many more sales from our Google ads. I don't see how Yahoo's search marketing can be so inefficient and terrible. BTW, we also tried MSN/Live search and it's been active for about a year with a $20/day budget. The amount of money we give Microsoft every month is about $5. In other words, Microsoft search has absolutely no volume at all.
My rights don't end where your feelings begin.
At least we know what search engine to use when you want to find useless shit that doesn't come anywhere close to your search query. Perhaps Google will partner with them to use them as a search result inverse filter -- anything Yahoobingstank returns can immediately be trimmed from the Google results. I better hurry up and patent that idea..
Lycos is the other small fish. Hotbot uses Windows Live search and Altavista uses Overture (heavily laden with Yahoo ads).
There's almost nothing available for download these days that doesn't try to package the Yahoo toolbar into the installer. I simply can't understand why so many companies are happy to have that that asinine, invasive, virus of a toolbar associated with their product. The only thing I can think of is that Yahoo might be hosting the download bandwidth for them.
And now this? My prediction: That damn toolbar will start showing up in MORE places, because now every Microsoft download will include it too.
Yahoo/Bing is not a threat for Google,as Google is so secure of its search market, such as the story that Bing has only 2% market share in Japan. Google is now putting its efforts and money in other areas such as killing the iphone, being an high speed fiber optic ISP, an energy provider...
Yahoo Groups is very useful.
I hear they have a search product, but I haven't used it for years.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes