Microsoft Owns Yahoo, err, Search
After years of speculation and actual talks between the companies, Yahoo is going to give up its organic search business and allow Microsoft to power their natural search results. Specifically Microsoft’s new Bing search engine will power all of the natural search results on Yahoo.com.
Over the next 2 and a half years Yahoo’s search engineers will be moving over to become Microsoft employees. The two companies will keep their display and Pay-Per-Click ads separate (Yahoo will sell their own inventory and Microsoft theirs).
It doesn’t represent a huge amount of money for Yahoo and they may lose users who start going directly to Bing when they see the “Powered by Bing” logo at the bottom of Yahoo’s results. Yahoo could become another AOL, who went this route before and lost.
What it does mean is that there will soon be no need to monitor search rankings on Yahoo for your site and most Search Engine Optimization will be focused on just Google and Bing. This is good news, at least now, as we see a lot of websites ranking on Bing more easily than on Yahoo.
What do you think? Will Yahoo users move over to Bing or keep using Yahoo as they have?