In terms of how this might benefit the innovation or the internet as a whole is still a question. They both might together own 30% of the search market, but what difference does it make? any thoughts?
This news actually has a practical impact on my business: if it means that I can buy advertising across both search engines at the same time through the same interface with the same creatives (ad text), then Microhoo can deliver me enough clicks per month to make it worth my time to actually sign into their website.
I pay Microsoft $30 a month for ads currently, and they just don't generate the traffic necessary to justify me logging in and optimizing their ads like I did for Google. (Which can fill $500+ per month of ads per me, even at the cheaper post-optimization CPC prices.)
I also tend to rank fairly well on Bing for searches of consequence to me relative to Google. Currently, that scarcely matters because few of my customers use Bing. More of my customers presumably use Yahoo (you should see how many @yahoo.com email addresses I have in my database) but for whatever reason I've never ranked particularly well there. Thus I'd expect a modest increase in traffic. However, the sad fact of the matter is ranking #1 on Microhoo for a tier-one keyword has been worth less to me than ranking #8 on Google for a tier-two keyword. (Tiers assigned subjectively based on search volume, perceived fit to my business, and observed conversion rates.)
I run lots of accounts and my experience is the same but more. Here in Australia, Google search seems to account for more then 10X Microsoft + Yahoo.
Yahoo (the number 2 at around 5%-10%) doesn't justify logging in to optimise. It also doesn't justify getting good at working with the platform to get the most out of it with less effort. The platforms are also just not as good as adwords. On top of that, the conversion rates seem to always be lower. I'm not sure if this is a reflection on Microhoo users or the ability of the system to optimise the ads themselves. It might even be that having less 'stock' (ads) to run, they are left with poorer choices and run my ads in less then optimal scenarios where google would see the low ctr and run some other ad.
It all ads up to Yahoo & Bing being ignored.
*Ideally, I would like to run everything from a central console that links to Google, yahoo & whatever else.
" More of my customers presumably use Yahoo (you should see how many @yahoo.com email addresses I have in my database) "
tangential, but I use my yahoo email whenever I need to enter my email id into a web form from where I could possibly get spam. The yahoo spam filters are terrible anyway. The gmail id is reserved for friends, family, programming mailing lists, project members etc.
This way I rarely have to check my yahoo account and work in my gmail account.
who in search is really innovating? probably the biggest plus for bing is akamai. thats not an algorithmic improvement.
innovation in search is going to slow down because it is too important to screw with. the risks of trying out radical new approaches to search far outweigh the gains...the fact is, most people have trained themselves to form queries that search engines like
I don't think this has much to do with innovation either. But if these companies wanted to innovate in some radical way they could do it on sites other than their main properties.
I don't think innovation in search will slow down any time soon, because there's just too much to be gained for anyone who comes up with a significant improvement. Not jeopardising their current business is a strong motivation, but not losing out to a newcomer speaks to their paranoia.
Yes we have been trained to use search engines in their current form, but I'm pretty certain that we will unlearn quickly once a better way has been found.
For instance, today, I feel it doesn't make a big difference to use grammatical sentences for searching. If I knew a search engine would try to understand what my intention is, I would start to use grammatical sentences.
The redesign last year has made me looking for other options already. I've been meaning to switch to http://pinboard.in/, the only problem being its far worse tag suggestions compared to del.icio.us's (because of a smaller sample to draw suggestions from).
Is there any word on whether Yahoo Japan is involved in this? I know that Bing is running in Japan now, but Yahoo Japan has always been a very separate legal entity.
no, msft will be collecting all the click data as well. yahoo may have the chance to sell ads for search on the phone, but no one wants to do that anymore. when you go to fill out a webform to sell ads on bing, it will be a msft page being served
y! really is exiting search AND search marketing here
Good call, I really think yahoo is bigger than just search. They could also use the money to develop their properties like flickr and news - think of it like in monopoly when 2 players trade with each ending up with a monopoly and get started building hotels. In this case the odd man out (google) doesn't get sympathy because he's rich and hansome; and already owns 60-8o% market share
Yahoo is terrible. The only reason I even go to Yahoo! is Yahoo! finance, however, as soon as I get my hands on some real data sources again, Yahoo! is gone completely.
