With Bing’s technology taking over both paid search engine marketing and organic results on Yahoo, many have seen the Search Alliance as an effective end to Yahoo! Search. However the senior vice president of Yahoo Search Products disagrees.
In a recent post on the Yahoo! Search Blog, Shashi Seth writes that “Yahoo! Search will always be a Search Engine”; even if it comes with the tagline “Powered by Bing.”
A direct response to “innuendo that….we are no longer a search engine,” Seth says that such comments are “amusing but a little irresponsible.” Using an arguable analogy, he says that the new arrangement reflects a comparative process seen in other industries.
“When groundbreaking new technologies are developed….industry players build their entire technology stack in-house. As these companies become more successful, and as technology matures, many building blocks of these products are outsourced – even some of the most critical components.”
Whilst his comparison to Boeing or Airbus aircrafts may fail to convince those who made the “innuendo” originally, his next statements reveal a more pertinent rebuttal. Seth says that the future of Yahoo is in the “hundreds of sources of data other than the web index” – in verticals such as social network content, video links, business listings and other contextually served data.
“We are still a search engine and in a strong second place in this very competitive marketplace,” says Seth. “Watch out for amazing stuff coming from this very search engine!”
Even if the defence may not be entirely convincing, Seth’s words appear to be felt by Yahoo’s shareholders - Yahoo’s stock is up 0.52% at the time of writing.
Related posts:
- How the Bing/Yahoo ‘Search Alliance’ will affect search engine marketing
- Yahoo and Microsoft still on track for search engine marketing integration
- Yahoo pilots new PPC ad feature for paid search engine marketing
- Yahoo says move to Microsoft’s search engine marketing platform a priority
- Yahoo CEO suggests Google is too reliant on search
