It seems that we search the information about Bing on Google.But there are something wrong between Yahoo and Microsoft…
For Yahoo, this is about cutting costs and guaranteeing revenue to stay afloat long enough to find its rudder. Microsoft is paying Yahoo 88% of revenue that comes from Yahoo’s search traffic; the New York Times estimates that could reach $500m (£300m) a year. And Yahoo can now jettison the technology resources that went into search.
That’s rather sad. After all, 15 years ago, it was Yahoo that first organized the web for us. Its original ambition seems quaintly naive today: human editors cataloguing every site worth visiting and deciding which were the hot ones we should visit. Back then, we, and Yahoo, thought the web was a medium, like TV, that we experienced together. Yahoo never quite broke out of that thinking. It still treats its site as a destination we have to go to with walls around it to keep us in. It just introduced a new homepage to some fanfare. Homepages are so 1999.
Just as Microsoft, Yahoo in tow, catches up to the last web by getting its search act together, the web changes form again. Google is already thinking past search and homepages. When I interviewed Josh Cohen, product manager for Google News, for the latest Media Talk USA podcast, he emphasised that sites need to distribute content all over the web, rather than expecting readers to come to them. “Letting go,” Cohen said, “is core to the internet.”
Microsoft is choosing an odd fight with Google - search - while Google is directly attacking Microsoft’s heart by creating its Chrome operating system for computers and phones, reinventing email, content creation, and collaboration with its new Wave tool, and by growing its Microsoft Office killer, Google Docs.
And if Microsoft wins almost a third of search traffic it will be hard to position its enemy, Google, as a monopoly.
What is the impact on the rest of us? For users, the competition in search can help; it usually does. Bing has garnered praise and traffic and will push Google to keep innovating. For marketers, there’s a second search player of greater scale, but that’s unlikely to greatly affect advertising costs because Google still dominates the market and because prices are set by auction. Indeed, having to advertise in more than one place may complicate life for marketers.
For publishers, there’s another source of traffic, but it stands to reason that search is a zero sum game: when I need to look for something I’ll probably choose Google or Bing. The question is whether it’s worth the effort to design search-engine optimization for more than one site.
So, let Yahoo and Microsoft celebrate their deal. Yahoo doesn’t have as much to celebrate. It turned down acquisition offers and now it gets no cash from Microsoft. And it is surrendering its earliest competence to a competitor. Microsoft has more cause to grin. It got Yahoo’s search traffic for no cash and doesn’t have to manage the rest of the old beast.
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