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.