back to article Microsoft! and! Yahoo! finally! sign! search! deal!

It's all over - Microsoft and Yahoo! have finally signed a search deal which means the end of Yahoo!'s long-developed independent search engine. The 10-year agreement means Yahoo! will use Microsoft's search technology and in exchange will sell both its own and Microsoft's search ads. Both companies will keep display ads sales …

COMMENTS

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  1. Jon Pratt
    Thumb Up

    Brilliant Deal!

    Well done to MS - they get access to all of the Yahoo goodness without having to buy them.

  2. citizenx
    Stop

    Dear MS/Yahoo

    Stop wasting your time and ours.

    1). Google have become the market leader because their service is simple, uncluttered and works.

    2). You have and will have nothing "novel" enough to pull users away from Google's long established service.

    3). Individually you are poor companies - MS - you are a monolitic and greedy entity who thinks it has a rightful place in every part of the IT market. You don't. Perhaps in the 80's and 90's you were edgy and fresh and rightfully grew, now you feel archaic and bloated. Yahoo, you service is cluttered and ugly. You rightfully lost the search battle with Google and have done nothing that i am aware of worth using for many years.

    4). You have both tried to compete with Google for a decade and failed. Guess what, the exact same thing will happen again.

    So, in conclusion, stop boring us with your crap and pointless plans. Go do something useful.

  3. Steve Foster
    Joke

    Name change for Yahoo!?

    From Yahoo Bang to Yahoo Bing, presumably...

  4. Grease Monkey Silver badge

    Oh!

    Google brought something nasty to internet searching, the idea that search rank should be somehow commercially influenced. I know most other engines have followed suit, but I blame Google. So I try to avoid them and try other search engines first, if you want good results the more search engines you use the better. Search engines that aggregate the results of other search engines are a great idea.

    So from my point of view the Microhoo! agreement can only be a bad thing since it reduces the number of search engines out there.

  5. Geoff Mackenzie

    A wannabe and a has-been

    They deserve each other.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Does this mean you'll now put an exclamation mark after Bing?

    After all, if any search engine deserved such a piece of punctuation, its Bing!

    Regards

    Neil

  7. Scary

    Yahoo!

    What's the big deal with Yahoo!? They have a WWW directory thing that went out of fashion when Altavista came along, a quite popular mailing list manager they bought, the weather and financial charts for people who don't need anything better than "free". I wouldn't give $1 million for them.

  8. Bilgepipe
    Gates Horns

    Bung

    So.... this seems to prove, then, that Bing is crap and needs Yahoo search to give it any kind of market share. I mean, M$ even tried paying people to use their search and that didn't make any difference...

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Exclamation marks everywhere breath a sigh of relief

    Type your comment here — plain text only, no HTML

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Halo

    Does this mean I won't see Yahoo! logos anymore?

    I always hated that logo. Reminds me of Jerry Springer, sun-bleached beercans, swamps and mobile homes with grass growing around the edges.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Exchange?!

    "Yahoo! will use Microsoft's search technology and in exchange" ... uh... EXCHANGE?!

  12. MarcF
    FAIL

    Attention! Internet! Advertisers!

    Advertise with us and immediately restrict yourself to 30% of your potential customer base!

    It's so crazy, it just might work...

  13. lightman
    Paris Hilton

    Micro-Who ?

    I wonder what color the Yahoo! Screen! Of! Death! will be ?

    As long as each search returns an accompanying lewd picture of Paris, success is guaranteed :)

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Distant 2nd place joins with distant 3rd place

    No one hurt, no one bothered.

    Google will only be challenged when someone comes up with: a) a snappy name, b) a very comprehensive index, and c) a better quality search engine.

    Google sucks, but it sucks less than the competition. which, frankly, is a damning indictment of the competition, because Google really sucks bigtime.

  15. richard 69
    FAIL

    so long yahoo...

    and thanks for all the phish...

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    @ Scary

    Yahoo! is the 2nd most visited website on the Internet - that's where its value comes from.

    http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yahoo.com

  17. TeeCee Gold badge
    Coat

    "Yahoo! expects this to contribute $500m"

    So is that a Bing bung then?

    The one with the bong in one pocket and the explosives in the other.

  18. Jay Castle
    WTF?

    Unless Google....

    .....starts:

    A.) Spamming me

    B.) Selling my details to advertisers

    C.) Failing to provide decent search results

    why would I change? I want nothing more from a search engine other than that they don't do any of the above. Surely most people are the same?

  19. Piers

    Yahoo! will use Microsoft's search technology

    WTF? I'm sure when this whole will-they-won't-they thing started MS wanted Yahoo's search engine. But it's been going on so long maybe I just don't remember right. Anyway, in the light of the whole sorry story this result looks just weird. MS is doing WHAT for WHY? Basically trying to buy market share - and if people who use Yahoo do it cause they LIKE yahoo they ain't going to necessarily like Bing are they. Looks like an opening to a FAIL.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Remember when...

    Yahoo! converted to use the Google engine?

    And to quote a friend of mine who described the first inklings of the deal in early 2008:

    "Strapping two pigeons together does not make an eagle"

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    We can all...

    ... eat Bart'z shorts.

  22. Kai Lockwood
    Gates Horns

    Goodbye Yahoo!

    Microsoft is going to absorb Yahoo! like an amoeba. And then kill themselves cause Microsoft does not know how to do search.

    '...One Bing to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. '

  23. Balefire
    Alert

    Market domination

    "This deal will combine Yahoo! and Microsoft search marketplaces so that advertisers no longer have to rely on one company that dominates more than 70 percent of all search."

    MS have shot themselves in the foot. The exact same thing can be said about the Desktop OS market - being dominated by one company must be a bad thing too.

    Oh, sorry, it's only a bad thing when it's not MS.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    @ citizenx

    Couldn't agree more, mate, well said, here have a pint on me...

    Our site currently gets about 3,500 hits a month from google sources, and about 90 from Yahoo (yes, nine zero). Even though we are well placed (top 3 results) in yahoo searches for our chosen key phrases, it's laughable really.

    Even AOL searchs beat yahoo in our stats, and that's just because of the AOL toolbar that gets included in most luser ware.

  25. Alan Esworthy
    Paris Hilton

    dumb fun with names

    YicroSo!o

    YooSoft

    MacroHo

    Paris who?

  26. iamapizza
    Pint

    As I was telling a friend of mine today...

    This story reminds me... I was telling a friend of mine earlier today, "Strapping two pigeons together does not make an eagle"

  27. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Neither Yahoo or Bing........

    Could find their own arse using both hands and a torch. Sticking with Google as it actually finds what I'm looking for and it's a good FOSS supporter

    Anyone noticed that MS says using their technology, doesn't yahoo run on FOSS (BSD) ? So MS is looking to remove a FOSS sponsor and extend their shit, insecure, virus ridden OS monopoly. Anyone care to expand on this point ?

    How about this for a new name :

    Gay Bi Ho No

  28. Brian Miller

    Yahoo! search technology? Eh, what?

    Yahoo! "search technology" was originally an expansion of the DMOZ.org data. They didn't actually have web spiders and automata to quantify sites. What technology did they use for their general web content search engine? Anything notable and revolutionary?

    Looks to me like Yahoo! saw that it was losing to Bing!, so it simply threw in the towel on search. I have read that they have a top web mail service, so maybe that's how they are making their advertising revenue.

  29. Duncan Jeffery

    Sooooo

    Everyone seems to think this is a bad idea/a union between two losers. So what is the problem ? Just sit back and watch them fail.

    As so often on these pages I am not sure what everyone's problem is

  30. This post has been deleted by its author

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Halo

    Wow, what a bunch of haters

    Hands up those who have given Bing even one chance. Anyone?

  32. Andrew Williams
    Black Helicopters

    I give it 18 months before Microsoft screws Yahoo completely

    Mayhaps the Yahoos I know can escape before they're outsourced to India.

  33. George Capehart
    FAIL

    Ahhhh, I see you have the machine that goes "Bing!"

    Michael Palin's Hospital Administrator says it all . . . Oh, and goodbye, Yahoo! Enjoy it while it lasts, Carl.

  34. W

    Currently giving DuckDuckGo a whirl.

    I was wondering if Google still deserved it's role as the default search in my browser so I tried a few alternatives. The obvious alts of Yahoo, Ask, Cuil, and Clusty were all just about capable but didn't really give sound enough case for shifting from Google. And each one irked me in one way or another.

    Quite liked Scour, but their pop up log-in prompts soon became annoying cos I clear my cookies and history at the end of each sesh.

    Currently giving DuckDuckGo a whirl. Daft name, but it's pretty good. Not perfect by any means. But it's quick, and seems like a genuine attempt to refine the searching process. I like the cut of it's jib and am still using it after a week for straight searches, but there are just some things (maps, translations...) that Google does really well on top (not to mention Gmail, Reader, etc). So I find that I just keep coming back to the G.

  35. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    ohh no....

    "Yahoo! will use Microsoft's search technology "

    Great news... bing, like its redecessor microscum search, couldn't find its own navel lint.

    Basically all search engines are near useless and commercially driven, just some are worse than others.

    Lets all watch Yahoo now plumb to even lower depths now that it has the Micr$haft lead (dead) weight around its neck.

  36. DavCrav

    Break Google up?

    70% share = monopoly = destruction?

  37. Deadly_NZ
    FAIL

    Yer what???

    Y achoo and Microshaft now there's the devil and Beelzebub of the internet world

  38. citizenx

    AC

    >Hands up those who have given Bing even one chance. Anyone?

    That is precisely the point. There is no NEED to give "bing" a chance.

    And yes, i suspect many of us may have had a quick go when it launched.

    None of us are obliged to use it just because you think we should!

  39. Grease Monkey Silver badge

    @Robert Long 1

    So iof nobody is bothered why are people using both MS & Yahoo! in the first place? Just because something is not the leader it doesn't become irrelevant. By your reasoning there would be no point in anybody starting a new company and the IT world would porbably still be dominated by IBM.

  40. James Pickett

    Permutations

    I'm surprised not to see more name combinations being mooted here. Binghoo, Bungho, Yahbong, that sort of thing.

    Big corporations are spendidly inept at catchy names - Zune and Bing are just the sort of duff names that a PR suit would think was cool, and none of his underlings would be brave enough to tell him it wasn't.

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