This week Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) and Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO) announced that they have received clearance for their search agreement, without restrictions, from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission.
This means that Yahoo! will close down its own search engine and start using Bing search results instead, probably as early as next week.
And then they were two
This is a historical moment. It means that we see the end of no less than three search engines that all have played important roles in web search history. The Yahoo! search engine was born out of the merger of three search engines: The American search engines Inktomi and AltaVista, and the Norwegian search engine Alltheweb.
For parts of the 1990’s AltaVista was the Google of its day, delivering better and more alternative search results than any other search engine. For a short while Alltheweb was considered a serious contender to the search engine throne, but Fast Search and Transfer did not have the clout needed to compete with Google, so they sold the technology to Overture, which was then bought by Yahoo!
The end of the Yahoo search engine also means that the big three are now the big two: Google and Bing. The only interesting competitors to these two are Ask and Hakia, but they are both lagging far behind Google and Bing/Yahoo! traffic wise.
What makes Yahoo! different?
Yahoo is trying desperately to explain that this does not mean that Yahoo! is no longer a search company. The argument is that although the organic search results and the paid text ads will be provided by Microsoft/Bing, the presentation of these results are Yahoo’s own.
Yahoo gives the following examples:
1) Yahoo! will provide you with “rich results that display the most relevant information from Yahoo!’s rich content properties, as well as other great product, local, entertainment, reference, social and tech sites.” In other words: Yahoo! will include additional information from other sites on the search result pages.
2) Yahoo will add “specific results from vertical search products, like Yahoo! News.”
3) Yahoo! will provide “handy tools on the left-side of the page, such as our Search Pad and Search Scan apps, site filters that help you refine and explore the search results more easily, and related search term suggestions to help you refine your search further if the results aren’t quite what you were looking for.”
This is all true, but Bing will also provide links to additional content, related searches, news and more. The only significant difference is that Bing does not have a “Search Pad” (i.e. a kind of integrated note book for saving, organizing and sharing search related notes).
Yahoo! from search to content
Yahoo! will save a lot of money by not having a large search engine development staff. The Yahoo!/Bing alliance will also be able to sell more text ads for a higher price, now that their combined market share makes their product more interesting.
The danger for Yahoo! is that they might see their search market share shrink, as people realize that Bing delivers the same search results in what many may consider a more elegant packaging. That would mean that Yahoo’s role as a major Internet portal will depend on their other web properties, including tools like mail and messaging, and content sites like Yahoo! Health and Yahoo! Sports.
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