As I'm sure you've all heard by now, Microsoft and Yahoo! have finally reached an agreement to merge their search technologies in an effort to "bring competition to the search engine market" (stick it to Google). This story was all over the Web yesterday, with thousands of bloggers eager and willing to provide all the details of the agreement. But just in case you're still in the dark, here is a quick overview of the deal:
- Bing will become the search platform used on all Yahoo! sites
- Microsoft will acquire an exclusive license to Yahoo!'s "core search technologies," and will have the right to implement those technologies as they choose into the Bing algorithm
- Both companies will maintain their separate online advertising businesses.
- The length of this agreement is 10 years
- This agreement will not even be approved until early 2010, and the plans of the agreement will not be implemented before 2011.
I felt I would be remiss if I did not provide some form of update to the blog I wrote about Bing earlier this month. At the time, Bing was boasting a 9% market share in their first month of searches. Now, Microsoft stands to hold 25-30% of that market with the acquisition of Yahoo!'s search traffic. They won't admit it, but that has to have Google concerned. While I did feel the need to provide an update to my last post on Bing, fortunately the conclusions I made then remain true now. Search engines change. No one really knows what will play out between Microsoft and Google in the coming years. Google itself is continually making changes to its algorithms and policies. What won't change anytime soon is that search engines exist to find quality content that is relevant to the user's search. If your content is relevant and of high-quality, people should find it no matter what search engine they use.