Microsoft to Compete with Bing Despite Yahoo Deal

SUNNYVALE, California (Reuters) – Yahoo Inc said on Monday it has revamped its search to compete against Microsoft Corp’s Bing, even as it relies on the Redmond giant to power its queries.

The announcement of plans to put a new face on Yahoo Messenger and Mail and add functions to its search engine came after news that Google and Yahoo each lost a fraction of a point of U.S. search share to Microsoft last month [nN18441019].

“We are not a version of Bing,” Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior vice president of Yahoo, said to reporters at the company’s headquarters.

“We are Yahoo and that will continue…We collaborate on the back-end but we are competitors on the front-end,” he said,

At a press event held at their headquarters, the company gave more details of its complex relationship with Microsoft.

At the end of July, Microsoft and Yahoo signed a 10-year deal under which search on Yahoo’s websites will be generated by Microsoft’s new Bing search engine. The companies hope the deal will take effect early next year.

Microsoft will license Yahoo’s search technology, allowing it to integrate certain aspects of it into Bing. Microsoft’s advertising search product, AdCenter, will also replace Yahoo’s equivalent product, Panam

Bing Ups Microsoft and Google

SAN FRANCISCO -
Microsoft Corp.’s souped-up Internet search engine gained a little more ground on industry leaders Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. in July, according to data released late Monday.

Despite the progress, Microsoft’s search engine still remains a distant third in the United States — the main reason that the world’s largest software maker plans to team up with Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo next year.

By working together in online search, Microsoft and Yahoo are betting that they can pose a more serious threat to Google in the most lucrative part of the Internet advertising market.

Microsoft’s search engine — renamed Bing as part of a June overhaul — ended July with a 8.9 percent share in the United States, up from 8.4 percent in the previous month, according tocomScore Inc. Just before Bing’s debut, Microsoft’s search market share stood at 8 percent.

You can read more at : http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090818/ap_on_hi_te/us_search_market_share

The Yahoo-Bing Search Merger and Why It Is Good For Everyone

The recent Yahoo and Bing search merger has shook up the search scenery and people are still putting together all the details and what it will mean to the common searcher, advertisers, and search engine optimizers. As we piece it together more, i have begun to feel as if this deal will be great for all parties involved, even Google. This may not make sense but hear me out.

To start, Bing had 9.4% of the search market while Yahoo had only 10.95%, so after the merger they combined to have 20.35% of the search engine market while Google dominates with 77.54%. You may be thinking How is it good for Google have a small competitor nipping at its heals? Google was not always the giant of the industry, they became the top dog through innovation that provided a better service. So who’s to say that the new Bing cannot do that? The extra competition hopefully will spur innovation and increased spending in research and development for both Google and Bing. This will improve the quality and speed of results. Google has already begun this. So the competition will keep Google on the edge which will make sure they do not get lazy.

Yahoo on the other hand is pretty much doing away with its search engine. It is a rather sad day because Yahoo search was a huge part of the evolution of search engines. But Yahoo is going down for nothing. Microsoft has agreed to pay Yahoo $50 million to be the Yahoo search engine, Microsoft is also giving Yahoo 88% of search advertising revenue. Yahoo surely is not caving in but instead making millions just for stepping aside and letting someone else challenge Google.

Microsoft made a very aggressive move with the Yahoo search merger. Bing wants to dethrone Google and judging by their actions they think they can. They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to promote Bing and it seems to be working with Bing usage increasing 1% a month. Bing benefits a lot from this deal because they now get to show off their fancy new search engine on one of the internet’s largest sites, Yahoo.com. This will bring them added credibility as well as added exposure and revenues, most of which go to Yahoo.

In the end it seems as if this was a power move by Microsoft to try and step on the toe of Google and frustrate them. But everyone will benefit from the move in the end so all works out.

Twitter Down

Oh no, looks like Twitter has finally met its match with a DOS attack.

Let’s be honest . . . once it is up it’s going to be about people griping about the site being down anyways. NEW YORK — A hacker attack shut down Twitter today, and Facebook also said it was “looking into” possible site problems. Twitter said in its status blog that it was “defending against a denial-of-service attack,” in which hackers command scores of computers to a single site at the same time, preventing legitimate traffic from getting through. For users of the fast-growing messaging service, the outage means no tweeting about lunch plans, the weather — or the fact that Twitter is down.

Microsoft to hire at least 400 Yahoo workers

SAN FRANCISCO -

Microsoft Corp. will hire at least 400 workers from Yahoo Inc. if government regulators approve the companies’ proposed Internet search partnership, and Yahoo will receive $150 million to cover any unexpected costs during the switch to new technology.

Read more here: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090804/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_microsoft_yahoo