Microsoft, Yahoo Finalize Search Agreement 77
Joe Quimby writes "Microsoft and Yahoo have finalized and executed their Web-search agreement after five months of deliberation, the companies announced Friday. Microsoft and Yahoo reached a revenue-sharing agreement in July to combine their search businesses. Under the 10-year agreement, Yahoo's Web search would be powered by Bing and Yahoo would retain most ad revenue from its site."
Reclamation of infrastructure (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd love to know what's going to become of all of the servers/networking gear that used to power yahoo search. Doubt they'll reformat and install windows/BING on them.
Re:Have I misunderstood (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, to be fair, Google did actually complain about that [infoworld.com] in 2006...
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Two irrelevants joining will remain irrelevant (Score:4, Interesting)
You're simplifying this all too much.
First, because trying to be the leader in search was never really Yahoo's game. They were about being a web portal -- basically, they wanted to be your home page. Personally, I prefer a clean home page for searching like Google's, and I suspect a lot of the people who read Slashdot do too, but an awful lot of people don't.
To that end they went after a lot of different things. Webmail, video, fantasy sports leagues, photo hosting (Flickr), games, news, etc. I'm not saying that's necessarily been a winning strategy for them as a company, but what they were trying to do was never strictly about search.
Microsoft, too, has a very multi-pronged business plan, even for the web. Sure, we've seen their mostly unsuccessful efforts in the search, web portal, webmail, and instant messenging areas, but there's also IE, ASP.NET, Silverlight, and too many other things to count, to say nothing of all the more indirect efforts like the XBox which start to bleed back over into the online space. In a lot of these areas they've taken on more successful established players or technologies and fought to gain market share, something that's been good for everyone since it's forced those established options to become better to stay ahead. Microsoft is the kind of company that will try to compete in a hundred different arenas, knowing that someone else might falter and that, even if not, maybe you can still make something good out of being #2 in a couple related areas.
Re:Not the first time (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes, they used Inktomi for a long time. And then they bought Inktomi and continued to use the search untill now I think. Yahoo was also one of the initial investors in Google, to make sure there were search engines available to power their search.