Power Sellers Unite

elgato · Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 17235 Location: Texas

Microsoft and Yahoo struck a long-anticipated search deal Wednesday under which Microsoft's Bing search engine will power Yahoo's search site, and Yahoo will sell premium search advertising services for both companies.

The deal, which took nearly a year and a half to strike and started with an unsolicited bid by Microsoft to buy Yahoo last February, is aimed at giving the two companies leverage against search giant Google, which leads the market in search-driven online advertising revenues.

According to the companies, the combined forces of the their search teams and assets will accelerate the pace and breadth of innovation to make them more competitive players in the search market.

The deal comes about two months after Microsoft revamped its search engine and relaunched it as Bing, which has already been taking share from Yahoo's search engine and has gotten early positive user reviews, according to analysts' statistics. For its part, Yahoo has a larger network of advertisers than Microsoft, and Microsoft will benefit now by having access to them.

more.. link to news article

mojavelyn · Posted: Wed Jul 29, 2009 12:11 pm Post subject:

Well, MS is going to have to improve Bing a lot more then what it is... 'm not imporessed with it. And I have never used yahoo search. I heard this just as I was falling asleep last night on the radio... wonder I didn't have nightmares.

elgato · Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 17235 Location: Texas

I use yahoo, google and msn searches depending on where I'm at online at that time. I just can't get to liking the name BING yet :roll: Too close to BLING IMHO.
There are other related articles about this new venure/merger which state they're "going after google" :roll:

elgato · Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 17235 Location: Texas

:roll:
The latest:

"Advocacy Group Calls For Scrutiny Of Microsoft-Yahoo Deal"

Advocacy organization Consumer Watchdog is urging the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department to look closely at the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo search deal to ensure there are no antitrust violations and that user privacy is guaranteed.

Under the proposed deal Yahoo would use Microsoft's Bing to sell ads that appear with search results. Google currently has 65 percent of the U.S. search market. Microsoft and Yahoo have 28 percent. Conventional wisdom is that the combination of the two smaller search businesses would offer stronger competition to Google.

"Whenever competitors combine, serious antitrust issues are raised. Those issues need to be resolved to the satisfaction of the Justice Department as well as European regulatory authorities," said John M. Simpson, an advocate with Consumer Watchdog.

"Even more important are questions about users' personal data, how it is collected, stored and shared. The Federal Trade Commission must ensure that consumers have control of information about them and that privacy guarantees are enforced."

Consumer Watchdog said the business model of search advertising companies is to collect as much information on users as possible and to use the data to target advertising. It says most Internet users are unaware of the amount of information about them that is gathered.

"If the result of this deal is that there are two stronger Internet search enterprises who exploit users' data at the expense of their privacy rights, consumers are worse off, not better," said Simpson.

more.. link to news article

mojavelyn · Posted: Thu Jul 30, 2009 3:01 pm Post subject:

Oh I know there is alot of info collected, but to what extent, I don't even think the collectors know. And target advertising... I hate seeing blogs and other written data with double underlines. thinking it might be some kind of more info about the article or that I got spyware.