Jaimie Dobson Internet Consultant

The big news story hot off the press today in the search engine world, is the 10 year deal agreed between Yahoo! and Microsoft when it comes to sharing search technology and advertising revenue.

The formal press release on the Microsoft site is here with their associated website for the concept available here.

Just Tell Me The Bare Bones!

For the uninitiated and those who can’t be bothered to trawl through the official press release (which is most of us to be honest), here’s a synopsis of the deal:

• Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine (Bing) will now be the search engine on all Yahoo! sites.
• Yahoo! will provide the relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers, namely the big corporates.
• Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business.
• Self-service advertising for both companies will go through Microsoft’s AdCenter™ platform (the equivalent service to Google’s AdWords).
• Microsoft will compensate Yahoo! through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo’s network.
• The term of the deal is 10 years.

(Credit goes to Stan Schroeder of Mashable for this summary)

In an even simpler nutshell, what this means for the majority of my blog readers is:

• If you currently use Yahoo’s search engine as your search tool of choice; in the future, the results you will see will be generated using the technology that presently powers Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
• If you currently advertise on Yahoo! using their pay-per-click Search Marketing service, then from this day forth, this will be provided by Microsoft’s equivalent to Google’s pay-per-click advertising product Adwords™, namely AdCenter.

So What?

“So what” is a fair question to ask!

Ultimately I suppose what Microsoft and Yahoo! are trying to do between them with this deal is make a significant dent in Google’s share of the search market which now dominates the world’s total internet searches to the tune of some 60% and as far as we Brits are concerned, some 80%.

But quite frankly are they going about it in the right way?

My Twitter and Facebook buddy, Graham Jones, argues in his blog post of earlier today that both parties in this deal are mistakenly focusing upon “search” and are trying to compete ‘head on’ with Google by attempting to beat them at their own game.

Instead, he argues, ’search’ isn’t the issue. People aren’t looking for an alternative ’search’ tool. Google is the cool tool of choice for most people with no real reason to change.

Sharing, Not Search

Instead Internet users are now looking for ways to share information, collaborate online and build communities. Google know this, which is why most of the funky features they are bringing to market are geared towards this and it’s recently gobbled up the likes of YouTube whilst rolling out useful services such as Street View.

Twitter knows this which is why it’s growing exponentially and Facebook knows this which is why it’s just added another 50 million subscribers to its existing 200 million global user base.

It seems the powers-that-be at Yahoo! and Microsoft are once again misinterpreting trends.

Both Graham and I could be wrong, time will tell; but I’m not getting the oven to ready to cook and eat my hat if we’re both wrong, just yet.

What’s your thoughts?

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Tags: Search Engines