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."

Comments

I think...

[sys.stdout.write]

I think I support this... I mean, Yahoo and Microsoft of course both suck, but Google needs some legitimate competition in the search market...

Re:I think...

[sys.stdout.write]

Yahoo CEO Bartz in a statement. "Yahoo gets to do what we do best: combine our science and technology with compelling content to build personally relevant online experiences for our users and customers."

"Science"? I think Yahoo! took the "Google Labs" thing a little too literally

Re:I think...

[algormortis]

Yes, Google should have some competition, however do you really think that Microsoft really needs to get any bigger? We've been hearing about Apple and Google going at each other's throats for quite some time now. I'd like to see if Apple ever steps up with a search engine of their own.

Re:I think...

[plantman-the-womb-st]

They have plenty of competition, there are thousands of companies that sell advertisement. "Search" isn't a product, in exactly the same way that TV shows aren't products, the commercial slots between and during shows are. You view of reality is skewed.

Re:I think...

[Enderandrew]

But this is less competition. Yahoo is no longer providing their own search results.

Google just lost a competitor.

Re:I think...

[WillDraven]

I would say they sell "search advertisements" as well as "syndicated web advertisement", "on demand video advertisement" and several other products. One could contrast these markets to "billboard advertisements", "tv advertisements" and "syndicated print advertisements".

Like it or not advertising is huge, and as such it makes sense to pay attention to these (relatively) smaller segments of the entire market for advertising services; especially when making decisions about the health of the market.

Re:I think...

[algormortis]

There are only three companies that I'd expect to ever surprise me with the markets they might potentially invade in the future: Walmart, Microsoft, and Google. I frankly would not be surprised if Walmart set their sights on the internet, nor if Google came out with their own phone service (emphasis on the service, I know they already have the Nexus). I can definitely also see Microsoft coming out with their own "smartphone".

Who will suffer?

[nicknamenotavailable]

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.

Re:Who will suffer?

[wealthychef]

I love that a posting that starts out "I refuse to read" is marked up as being "informative." Oh, Slashdot! You make me smile a little.

Both?

[The Wild Norseman]

Yahoo and Bing?

Now I can ignore both at the same time!

Re:Both?

[westlake]

Now I can ignore both at the same time!

Because ignoring Microsoft has served the geek so well in the past.

Yahoo draws about 130 million visitors a month, who spend about 5% of the their time online there.

Re:Slashcode bug

[MichaelSmith]

Maybe /. should outsource their search to Yahoo!

And Ubuntu transitions to Yahoo search

[wdconinc]

That's ironic. Just today Firefox on Ubuntu (Lucid) was updated to default to Yahoo search...

More choices? wtf?

[nicknamenotavailable]

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.

Re:More choices? wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

currently in online advertising there is ZERO choice, you go with google or you get only a fraction of the audience, by joining up with bing (the better search of yahoo and bing imho) they gain enough market share to be a viable choice, hence there is more choice.

also don't make the mistake that you are the customer here that is supposed to get more choice, you are googles/bings/yahoo's product, the customers/consumers are the advertisers and they are the ones getting more choice.

Re:More choices? wtf?

[wealthychef]

the customers/consumers are the advertisers and they are the ones getting more choice.

God, I'm really trying to get excited about that. It's not working.

Why is it okay for Microsoft?

[Enderandrew]

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?

Welcome to Google...

[iCantSpell]

Yahoo users.

it's been good to know you Yahoo

[Locutus]

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

Re:it's been good to know you Yahoo

[adolf]

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.

Re:it's been good to know you Yahoo

[hairyfeet]

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.

padding

[Gerzel]

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.

Farewell Yahoo!

[miffo.swe]

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.

Google has no competition

[too2late]

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.