At last, Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal is on its way. The regulators ave approved the deal on 18th February, 2010. It’s a remarkable incident. Microsoft and Yahoo both announced that both U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission have given clearance for their search agreement, without restrictions. The two companies will now turn their attention to beginning the process of implementing the deal.
The deal actually will see Bing’s search technology power Yahoo’s search results. It has been a long way for both the companies. The companies agreed to a complicated search deal in July, 2009.
Microsoft will take over Yahoo’s organic and paid search results and blend those resources into Bing. Yahoo will continue to control the front-end UI of search on Yahoo’s sites, and consumers will continue to see and be able to use the Yahoo search engine. The transition of the back-end search algorithms and results may still take until the end of 2010 to complete. Advertisers and Website partners which use Yahoo search may have to wait until after the 2010 holidays to be transitioned to Bing.
The companies will now proceed with implementation. The companies say that process “is expected to begin in the coming days and will involve transitioning Yahoo!’s algorithmic and paid search platforms to Microsoft, with Yahoo! becoming the exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers globally.”
According to Yahoo Search Blog:
Yahoo! will continue to enhance the search result listings as we do for people today. A few examples of this are:1) Providing 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.
2) Showing specific results from vertical search products, like Yahoo! News.
3) Providing 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.
Tomorrow’s Yahoo! Search:
And what you’re seeing today is just the tip of the iceberg. With Microsoft providing us the underlying list of search results, our Yahoo! team can now focus on making the overall experience of finding stuff online and getting things done easier for you – whether you’re searching at yahoo.com or just looking for specific information in the moment while using our many great products and properties on any device. We have lots of ideas for things we can do to help you with three main aspects of searching:
• Ways to find things faster when you’re just starting your search – by continuing to enhance our great Search Assist technology and also weaving search more deeply and conveniently into other Yahoo! products.
• New ways to help you explore the things that matter most – whether that’s with more rich results and options for organizing the search results page, or by showing you interesting Search topics that you might want to browse through in other relevant places that you spend your time on Yahoo!
• More apps and other tools to help you get things done as quickly as possible. We know that people don’t want to search per se – you want to complete tasks in your day, and we’ll be inventing new ways to help you do that.
Yahoo and Microsoft aim to have search integration completed in the U.S. by the end of this year, though transitioning advertisers “may wait until 2011 if they determine that the transition will be more effective after the holiday season.” Globally, the companies expect to have the whole move completed by 2012.
In conjunction with the announcement, Microsoft and Yahoo have launched searchalliance.com, though the site appears to be down as of 11:10 ET.
Since the deal was announced, Bing has been taking search share away from Yahoo. The question now is whether the combined scale of search across all of Yahoo and Bing can help Microsoft make a dent in Google’s dominance.
Sources: Mashable, Tech Crunch, Yahoo Search Blog
