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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
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.
The haters without information are out tonight!
Whatever.
Yahoo faded from usefulness just as quickly (or slowly) as search engines became useful (rather than being a glorified text search, displayed in no particular order)). I've been around Teh Intarwebs long enough to remember a time when, if you wanted to find something. It was just a big, human-sorted list of sites. It didn't have everything, but it had a starting point for most stuff. There were lots of other lists in no time, but Yahoo's was the largest and broadest.
I remember the birth of Altavista, which was the first nail in Yahoo's coffin (there were other early players which contributed, but none of them sucked less than Altavista).
Ever since, it's just been getting worse for them. Indexes of websites are hardly useful these days. Yahoo tried to branch out, with chat, and news, and forums, and lots of other things... But, ultimately, it seems they're failing because their original focus and purpose has become all but useless, as the slug around the expensive weight of all the other stuff they've tried to do since. When I went there a second ago, I couldn't even find the index anymore in all the noise they have on their front page. (Does it even exist?)
Google's uncanny usefulness was one of the next nails in the coffin. Bing and other useful search engines, have driven the last spikes.
It's very interesting to me that, back in Google's infancy, long before adwords, or any ads at all within Google, their chief source of revenue was Yahoo, who used them as their search engine. That's right: Yahoo used to pay Google for search services. And now the two big search engines both want to pay Yahoo for the same thing.
Buh-bye, Yahoo.
Kid-proof tablet..
What you are looking for is this, the other is simply their web portal. And I know folks make fun of their "bloated" web portal all the time, but being in PC repair I can tell you the web portal was actually a brilliant idea. Why?
Because working on the PCs of the non tech over 30s I find that nearly all of them, down to the last man and woman, have their home page set to the Yahoo web portal. Either they have it set to Yahoo themselves, or through an affiliate like AT&T, but either way they DO have it set to Yahoo's web portal and will actually get pissed off if you dare touch it. In fact many of the older folks call it their "paper" and spend a huge amount of time there, reading the headlines, checking the weather, even checking their horoscopes for fun, before they use the Yahoo Search at the top to venture out onto the web. That is a whole lot of captive eyeballs for Yahoo and now MSFT. So I would say it is pretty damned smart.
And does anybody know if this will affect Yahoo Mail in any way? I have never read anything one way or another but I always thought search was a trojan horse for MSFT to get their hands on Yahoo Mail. Last I checked Yahoo Mail was the #1 Webmail, and Live Mail a very distant third, so getting a hold of Yahoo Mail would not only catapult them to #1 in webmail, but also give them mountains of data to mine and even more eyeballs hooked, as all the non techs also spend a crazy amount of time in Yahoo webmail. If MSFT ends up getting access to Yahoo webmail this could really be a smart move on their part, already just by taking over Yahoo search they will be the default engine for the portal and webmail users, and that is a hell of a lot of searches.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.