Bing And Yahoo Announce New Search Deal

HI all,
The latest search deal between Yahoo and Microsoft has galvanised the SEO world for another bout of dynamics that will impact on the future of the search industry. The deal between Yahoo and Bing is to last for 10 years but the complete implementation will take atleast 2 years.

Bing will be the new search engine on Yahoo. Microsoft can integrate Yahoo search technologies into its existing search platforms. Both companies will have their own display advertising business. Microsoft’s AdCenter platform will set the pricing for self serve advertising for both companies.

Although there is a lot of money involved in this deal,  users would be more interested in how things evolve with the retention or crucifixion of web applications and services that they have been using for some time. Applications like Yahoo Search Monkey and Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) by using Delicious bookmarks have been hallmarks in enhancing the semantic nature of the web.

Legal hurdles not withstanding, it will be interesting to watch how the search landscape evolves in future with this new development. Bing’s search market share is expected to increase to 28% after the deal with Yahoo as per Adage reports citing ComScore’s data. The quality of search results from Bing is really good and this is proved by the display of search results on Yahoo powered by Bing in future. Microsoft is the clear winner at this stage.

A search on Bing today shows paid advertisements relevant to the search query on the side and bottom of the organic results. In the proposed scheme, Yahoo will sell paid ads against organic search results powered by Bing.

Yahoo is no stranger to the evolution of search having been around for a long time. Microsoft gains the use of  Yahoo’s search technology to give Bing a powerful springboard to take the fight right into the Google heartland.

Google has always been a frontrunner in developmnt of new and exciting search innovations and has not rested on its laurels. This deal between Yahoo and Bing should now give Google a sense of urgency to evolve further and differentiate to stay ahead of their competitors to dominate the search industry.

Competition is really good especially for the end users in terms of better quality search results and better user experience. It is also easier for search practitioners to switch their mindsets to getting used to two major search engines instead of three.

Yahoo’s search team takes a lot of credit for the development of the semantic web and open standards and lot of time and money have been put into these efforts at the peril of Yahoo getting rounded up for not being commercially savvy company.

A few of the search services that come up for consideration under the new arrangement can be expected to be sacrificial lambs, maybe measured by their ability to generate revenue. Also at stake are the careers of search engineers working on those applications.

According to ReadWriteWeb Yahoo has confirmed that Yahoo Maps search and Yahoo News search services come under the purview of consumer facing list of search services and are no longer formally part of the search department. Since Bing sells such services on its own, Yahoo may end up selling ads against the Bing powered results on Yahoo.com

All these pointers virtually herald the demise of Yahoo as a search giant. Yahoo’s Siteexplorer could face the axe. It has been a great tool to find backlinks to a site. Many applications built around its functionality can bite the dust.

Some of the interesting links related to Bing are:
Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Local and Bing Local Listing Center

Bing Vs Google Results

The new realtionship forged by Yahoo and Microsoft will hopefully add lot more value and quality to their combined search offerings and pose a serious competition to Google in future. A detailed coverage of events can be found at Readwriteweb and SEOmoz.

Netconcepts is an Auckland seo company offering quality search engine optimisation and pay per click marketing services to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 11:55 am and is filed under Blogging, Consultants, Natural Search, Ravi Venkatesan, SEO-Search Engine Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.