Yahoo Search now run by Microsoft
It’s official, Yahoo are out of the search engine business.
Anyone now searching on Yahoo won’t really know the difference, but essentially all they’re using is a rebranded version of Bing.
As many of you may recall, Microsoft have been trying to get their mits on the web portal giant for years, five, by my count, with Microsoft once offering a whopping $46.6 billion US for the company, only to be rebuffed.
Then, last summer, Yahoo announced that it was getting out of search completely and turning over control of the search engine side of their business to Microsofts then-new Bing search engine. The deal would leave Yahoo as a completely independent entity albiet one which essentially oursources its search engine operation to Microsoft.
Yesterday it went live.
This is nothing new for Yahoo, who’ve had similar deals in the past, including a search alliance with Google. Traditionally Yahoo were always more interested in web directories and didn’t understand all the fuss about search engines. When one recalls the early days of search engines it’s easy to understand why. They were still a relatively new phenomenon and, until Google came on the scene, nobody had really cracked it.
Unlike so many others, Yahoo emerged from the Dotcom Crash intact, its market share bolstered by several aquisitions including search provider Inktomi, but by that time it was too late, Google were already leaps and bounds ahead of Yahoo in terms of search engine technology. Yahoo instead began to concentrate more on pay per click advertising and emerging social technologies, once again through aquisitions, such as photo sharing site Flickr and the social bookmarking site Delicious.
The Microsoft deal marks the end of an era for one of the search engine industry’s biggest players and leaves Microsoft now the second largest search engine though still far behind Google which presently enjoys over 70% market share. [source: search engine market share statistics]
Whether or not Bing can ever catch up with Google is unlikely. Though with new social rivals such as Facebook stealing Google’s thunder both in terms of traffic and ppc revenue they may want to rethink all those millions of little side projects they keep announcing and start to concentrating more on their bread and butter; pay per click advertising and search.