BBC News reports that the US and European regulators (yes, the same EC that slapped MS with a EUR900M fine) have approved the deal that will see Microsoft control Yahoo’s search and advertising business. This will mean that one of the first, great search engines (there was a time before Google) will now be powered by johnny-come-lately Bing.
After failing to buy Yahoo outright for $44.6B, this new deal is a ‘revenue-sharing agreement’ where Yahoo gets to still be Yahoo (just with a lifeless Bing-powered soul). The deal was inked way back in July, but they have had to wait for approval from the regulators before going forward.
Under the terms of 10-year Microsoft-Yahoo agreement, Microsoft’s Bing search engine will power the Yahoo website, while Yahoo will in turn provide the main advertising sales team for Bing.
In exchange, Microsoft will retain 12% of the search engine revenues generated via Yahoo’s website for the first five years of the deal, while paying the remaining 88% to Yahoo.
I am disappoint. In the 90’s and early 00’s Yahoo used to be great, I didn’t switch to Google until approximately 2002/3. Yahoo have been through rough times in the last few years, fighting a losing battle against Google, but I am dissapointed more in Microsoft who seem to believe that the solution to their technical problems (their search results suck—compare) is to just keep buying themselves marketshare. This wouldn’t have happened with Bill Gates around (“Buy him out, boysâ€).
In my opinion, this will not help Microsoft compete with Google one iota. It will just make the second best search engine suck as bad as Bing and that will only help Yahoo users move away. I can only hope some of the technical expertise at Yahoo flows the other way and teaches Microsoft a thing or two about how to search.
Wow, good job Canonical. You’re going to be helping prop up Microsoft in your default Ubuntu installs. That’s priceless.
Yahoo has way better privacy regulations than Google which is also a monopoly.
BTW, Ubuntu ships with Mono preinstalled. That is also helping MS in a way.
The term ‘monopoly’ is so misused.
Google do not hold a search engine monopoly. Not in the US nor Europe.
While they may have a dominant market share, they do not use said market share to restrict other search engines nor do they have a market share that even comes close to that of Windows during the whole MS antitrust trials.
Google just have a majority market share and numerous newly emerging entrants to the technology sector (be it smart phones, OSs and so on)
That aside, I’d actually quite like to see Canonical support a search engine that isn’t Google or Yahoo/Bing.
The only true way to even a market is to have many competitors, not just 2 major players.
I fail to see how Ubuntu preinstalling Mono helps Microsoft. In fact, because of Mono, users attached to certain .NET apps aren’t necessarily stuck in Windows. They can avoid paying for Windows, switch to Linux and still use their apps (or close equivalents) ported to Mono. If anything, Mono hurts Microsoft more than it can help them.
things that hurts microsoft gets sued to death by them
we lose costumers to that company lets see what patents we can use against them.
sudo apt-get purge libmono* libgdiplus cli-common libsqlite0 libglitz-glx1 libglitz1
that was easy
Prop up Microsoft? With the 12 cents a quarter Bing makes in search? MS doesn’t make any money from searches, and Yahoo is barely making it.
This hardly changes anything.
Actually, it could change a lot:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60S2RW20100203
The basic problem, as I understand it, actually isn’t too dissimilar from what SReilly was talking about in his article on the fate of high-end RISC ISAs.
Building a mondern search engine requires a ton of capital investment. Web search combines the challenges that come with creating a global-scale datacenter with the domains associated with search: natural language processing, pattern matching, geographic information systems, data mining, &c. Doing search well means having infrastructure and talent well above what most other services require.
(And this is probably the main reason pretty much all other contenders have dropped off or failed to gain traction entirely. Very few other companies have have the capacity to scale either, much less both, to the extent that’s necessary to remain competitive. Even Amazon.com, which has huge datacenters and a lot smart engineers, wasn’t able to make inroads with their A9 engine.)
Evidently, Microsoft is only willing (able?) to subsidize their search business with so much of their Windows+Office revenue–which I have to say is almost refreshing on some level. In order to justify taking this investment further, they need to make Bing profitable. This Yahoo deal gives Microsoft a sizable enough audience to attract attention from advertisers, which will bring enough revenue to finally start doing things like competing outside the US in a meaningful way and addressing the technical issues around relevancy and index freshness–although the Yahoo engineers they’re getting from this deal will hopefully help that, too. If Bing can continue to inch upwards and become profitable by sometime this year, or 2011 at the latest, they could be in a really good position to compete with Google in a serious way.
Edited 2010-02-19 19:06 UTC
MS hardly has a monopoly on the search market, and yahoo has not really been about search for a very long time now. MS needs an ad network, and yahoo needs a better search engine, so it seems like a win/win. If anything, it brings yahoo closer to being an actual google competitor, which is good for everyone.
I should have included that the regulators allowed this because combined, they only represent 10% of the market and the regulators think that this will provide better competition against Google. I’m not inclined to agree. bigger doesn’t necessarily mean smarter.
It depends on how much synergy happens. I would want a better Yahoo, but I’m not interested in a better Bing.
Thing is, having an established ad network doesn’t make bing better, it adds to its monetization. Having a better search engine does make yahoo better, and like it or not, bing is definitely in second place when it comes to quality.
That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Shouldn’t you want all search engines to be better to spur competition?
If there was competition in this deal, and it did cause a push for betterment of search, then I would be all for it.
In practice, however, this deal does no such thing. There used to be three main search providers, and now there will be two. That is less competition.
Also, Microsoft is using this simply to boost the apparent usage rate of Bing. Bing is still exactly what it was before … it isn’t any better. This is not about improving search or making Bing better … it is purely about marketing spin. Nothing more.
It is a move very reminiscent of what Microsoft tried on against Apache’s dominant market share compared to IIS.
http://www.raiden.net/?cat=2&aid=287
Cheating. Just flat out cheating. In the case of Apache’s share Microsoft cheated by buying parked domains, and by creating parked domains of their own, and registering them as IIS. There were no actual servers, nor any actual websites, nor any actual copies of IIS or Apache involved.
In this case, it is simply a matter of buying Yahoo’s search customers, and claiming them for Bing’s statistics.
It is just spin. Plain marketing spin. It has nothing at all to do with competition, or with improving search.
Yet another thing you don’t comprehend, despite all your assertions!
Here’s the reality: the more data you have, the better your search can be, partially determined by algorithms to process it, which, as a direct consequence, due to the number of users using it, makes it far more commercially viable via the network effect for users using it to generate click-through data and search data in general to place ads: if you don’t have a certain amount of scale with all of those, you simply cannot make money due to not being able to charge a low enough ad rate to cover the expenses, due to the overhead involved.
Here’s the thing perhaps you’re not comprehending: Yahoo! is almost entirely a content publishing company these days, that happens to place ads within their user-digested (and often generated, as in Yahoo! Answers) and that’s where a lot of their revenue and profit comes from.
My source of credibility for these statements is I last worked at Yahoo! on their internal web analytics database platform: what’s yours, other than being an anti-Microsoft ranter?
lol. Love the end
You’re going waaay off track. He said he wasn’t interested in a better Bing, yet a better Yahoo is OK.
There are a lot more search engines than just Yahoo, Bing and Google.
Actually, that’s completely false. There will actually be more competition. A divided search engine market doesn’t pose any threat to Google at all. But a combination of Yahoo and Bing creates more advertising reach, gives advertisers more incentive to go with Yahoo/Bing and, consequently, increases competition with Google. And that’s precisely why the Justice Department and the EU approved the deal.
Not in the case of Microsoft because past history has taught us that they seek to control the internet with closed technology.
People may not like Google’s dominance, but at least they seek openness (any platform, any browser) as their money comes from advertisements and not OS sales.
Edited 2010-02-19 10:39 UTC
I was going to say “Yahoo don’t have an OS”, but I suspected I’d be ripped to pieces for inferring as such.
Bing => Live => Silverlight => .NET => Windows.
That’s MS’s goal.
You spend a lot on tinfoil each week don’t you? Maybe you should check with Lemur on where to get it in volume….or do you reuse the same hat?
Microsoft want a single vendor ecosystem, it doesn’t require tinfoil to spot that. Apple are just the same (though at least the work they are doing with WebKit is beneficial to all).
my reply:
I take it you weren’t into computers when Microsoft were trying to control the internet by applying their own, Internet Explorer specific, standards?
In many respects we’re in a golden age for the internet: bandwidth is cheap, websites are mostly platform independent and as such you can browse the web on many devices from desktop PCs to mobile phones.
However things weren’t always like this. There never used to be much competition against Internet Explorer and you used to only be able to get online with a desktop (be it Windows, *nix or Mac OS).
These days you don’t need Windows – or even an x86 CPU – to browse the web, send e-mails, use a word processor, spreadsheet or image editor.
Plus with cloud systems on the rise, it’s easier than ever to run your data across platforms.
So Microsoft need to protect their market share and to do this they also need a presence online.
How ironic you should say this, and yet have such great ignorance to the subject at hand. Maybe you need to brush up a bit kid on how things were 10-15 years ago. You see if you had a clue, you could not make such an idiotic statement. If you have no idea as to what I am referring to…this is the point where you need to educate yourself instead of blabbering tiresome rants made by equally ignorant anonymous internet fools.
I will give you a simple hint on where to begin…it starts with tables and layouts. Now go get clue.
For crying out loud, is it really that hard to type a mature and informative reply rather than several paragraphs of insults where you make no points what-so-ever?
1/ Internet Explorer WAS the domninant browser 10 years ego.
Sure, Netscape was dominant 15 years ago, but MS pushed IE onto every desktop and thereby kicking off the long drawn out EU court battles that we still read about today.
2/ Internet Explorer was NOT standards compliant.
Amongst other jobs, having been a web developer for the last 15 years (yes that’s right – I’m not just some hobbyist that’s talking out of his rectum like you stated), it was a PITA coding for both Netscape and IE because both browsers liked to do their own thing.
IE got particularly bad when it supported a whole array of functions that even browsers today don’t support (hence why there’s such a mess upgrading some organizations IT infrastructure from IE6 due to internal cloud apps target specifically towards IE’s extended “standards”)
3/ Microsoft have always tryed to push their own proprietary technology online. If it wasn’t non-standard web tags, then it was ActiveX and Silverlight.
Sure, Silverlight is cross-platform – for now – but it’s still a MS owned technology designed to take attention away from HTML5 (which IE doesn’t support yet nearly every other browser does).
This maybe a “tin-foil hat” moment, but what happens if IE gains 90% market share? Will MS continue to support non-Windows builds of Silverlight or will the break them with undocumented version upgrades to the Windows edition?
I’m guessing the latter given MS tried to build a Windows only web before with ActiveX.
So go ahead and spew insults to anyone that opposes your opinion with reason and then goes on to back it up with examples.
I personally would rather listen to the so called “ignorant” opinions of those (who ironically are also web developers talking about the development of the web) than your mindless, pointless and deeply offensive trash talk.
</rant>
Since you did not answered the question, I assume it is safe to assume that you indeed you were not into computers less than 10 years ago.
Microsoft’s pattern, which a few posters have pointed out, is not something new or rare. It has been their MO for the better part of almost 2 decades.
Yes, stop before you lose your head :p
http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/brierdudley/2007/10/11/yahoos…
(This is where I worked, and what I have worked on, and yes, I have the polo shirt to show for it!)
Wish Ask looking for a buyer and Yahoo now just using Bing the “real” search competition has been reduced to 2 players, google and bing. There are things i find on yahoo that i cant find in bing or google (and vise versa of course). We are now left with one less choice, and personally i am not all that thrilled with google (good results but i have a grudge against the company, or any company that acts like your friend till it consumes you while your sleeping), and Bings results or often almost useless to me. Bing probably works fine for most people but if i am searching for something online its often something that is tricky to find, and bing fails me there most of the time.
Yahoo had so many things going for it, and I love Jboss and some of their other search related projects.
all in all, it just bothers me. The EU especially disappoints me here. They make this big stink about requiring options for things like web broswers and what not, but they have no problem allowing the search competition to be reduced to (essentially) 2 players?
….if anyone needs me i’ll be in the angry dome (grumble mumble rant grumble)… http://theangrydome.ytmnd.com/
Edited 2010-02-18 21:16 UTC
Yahoo having a search engine has been a rather recent and minor phenomena though. Up until the late 90s they only had the directory-style web navigation. They then licensed searches from Inktomi for a number of years, and then switched to having Google as the backend 2001-2004. Only then did they start doing their own crawling and searching. So, switching to licensing searches from Bing is rather a return to their roots by Yahoo rather than the fall of a giant.
style web navigation” search engine. It’s an interesting concept, but completely unscalable as the internet grows, seemingly exponentially, each year.
I seem to remember that at one point MSN used Yahoo as its backend (before MS created Live Search). The reverse will now be the case.
I was thinking the same thing. I only swapped from Yahoo to Google when I realised that Yahoo no longer used them as a search provider. It was Yahoo using Google that made me find out about them in the first place
try clusty.com and also dogpile.com both are rather interesting search engines…
clusty is nice, but its rarely updated and was more of a research project by vivisimo to show case some of their enterprise tech (they have a good search engine though). As for dog pile, it just searches other search engines such as Ask, google, yahoo, and bing. quintura.com is one of my alt favorites though.
Um… Bing is switching to Yahoo’s engine. MS licensed Yahoo’s tech, hired Yahoo’s search dev team, and is now paying Yahoo to stay as it was before because all that’s happening is that MS’ servers execute the searches.
In the end it’s a huge win for Yahoo. Yahoo no longer needs to do the development, hosting, etc. and gets even money for that. OTOT MS even gave Yahoo all its premium ad customers.
“Um… Bing is switching to Yahoo’s engine.”
swing and a miss. Yahoo is going to use Bing and while bing will be using parts of yahoo and has brought on some of yahoo’s search team. BOSS powers yahoo search: http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/
Bing is not powered by boss, its powered mostly by Powerset which MS acquired to make Bing possible: http://www.powerset.com/
I’ll have a WAAAmburger and an order of french cries for my friend, Kroc.
I’m upset because of this deal. Google = EVIL and Bing = MEDIOCRE. Yahoo Search was the only middle ground worth using. Not anymore.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10456118-265.html
this will clear a few things up
…Bing is a decent search engine from what I can tell, and by the way for all the “they don’t plan on making it better” folks posting: It JUST ARRIVED ON THE SCENE. Criminy. You know how fast Microsoft works… give them some time to make a few improvements.
Yahoo really can only stand to benefit from this. Some weight off their shoulders. And Microsoft (or at least some part of Microsoft) will want to make this work.
All of this just leads to lighting some fire under Google’s butt to encourage some more innovation.