After eight months, Microsoft and Yahoo have now been given the green light from authorities to seek their cooperation. Both the DoJ and the EU Commission has approved the alliance between the two companies, which has long flirted with each other. Microsoft tried back in 2008 to buy the old portal giant Yahoo, which never really did change from the sorted, cataloged Internet for free search, where Google is the king unwavering. Microsoft has tried to attack Google’s search engine Bing, but still sits at a tiny fraction of the search market.
The proposed Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo was never to anything, maybe because the culture of the two companies are too different. For many Yahoo-Microsoft people are still the major nemesis. Yet it manages to reach the new search agreement, so now have the official seal of approval. The agreement means that Yahoo will use Microsoft’s search engine on its own pages – a recognition that Yahoo is simply not good enough for the search itself – while Yahoo is allowed to sell search ads on both Bing and his own pages.
It is easy to see what Yahoo gets out of the agreement, but it is a little harder to figure their way to where the big advantage for Microsoft is. Software Company believes that Bing search algorithms can be improved by “train them” on the millions of Yahoo users. For the average user will probably be hard to see the difference when the new Bing version of Yahoo will air later this year. The only difference is that search results on Bing and Yahoo now will be the same, but they will be presented in different ways.
The question is whether the agreement should make Google to fear for its market position. Despite a robust growth sits Bing was still only 10 per cent. of the search market, while Google clearly dominates with 65 per cent. Yahoo has around 17 percent. of the market. Although the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo will be difficult to challenge the king of search engines.
