Remember back in February when Google got all protective over Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo!? Their line was that the bid was a bad idea and the gripe was that (in a whiny voice) ”It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation”.
Well, now it’s official, so Google can go weep in the corner for poor Yahoo!- they’ve set-up a 10 year search and advertising deal with Microsoft. Actually Yahoo! won’t be that poor, with an annual profit projection of $500 billion and estimated savings of $275 million.
The Times reports (and I am not terribly enthused to hear this) that while “Microsoft is counting on Yahoo!’s search engine” to maintain the challenge to Google “Yahoo! [will] use Microsoft’s new Bing search engine on its own sites”. For me you see Yahoo! is simply a better proposition than any Bing-like-thing. With a partnership like this the future for SEO is unlikely to get dull, not that that was ever really going to happen, but anything to challenge Google’s dominance will keep it extra-lively.
I guess the watchwords here should be “wait and see” or even “wake us up when something finite and interesting has happened” as the joining of the 2nd and 3rd biggest search engines could yet be blocked by US antitrust regulators. The comments, posts, tweets, essays etc. on this news will run and run, but will anybody be saying “poor Google”?- like that’s going to happen.
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