Google has really been giving the search world a one-two punch with daily developments for user interaction. Both MSN Live Search (now known as Bing) and Yahoo have re-invented their search platforms, but Google is still on the up-and-up and maintaining firm control in the search market. To cut costs and raise revenues the two other search engines have joined forces. Now that they have gotten together, what shall we call this duo? YaBing!? I hope it catches on!
Microsoft has tried to acquire Yahoo in the past, but the deal was turned down because management was greedy, even delusional; the company now sells for a small percentage of Microsoft’s offering price. Now that Microsoft has released Bing, Yahoo has changed its tune since there is evidence the revamped search engine is able to compete with Google by gaining a few points back in market share.
From now on, when you search in Yahoo, you will really be seeing the indexed pages provided by Bing. Yahoo will save money by outsourcing the indexing process, which includes web crawling. Where the two are hoping to make more revenue is in the advertising associated with Pay per Click. Yahoo will focus on the paid ads and give a percentage to Microsoft. Site owners who have a PPC programs with Bing will also be shown on Yahoo giving their customers a visibility bonus.
The search community that utilizes these two search engines will not likely see a change until 2011; but change is coming. What does this mean for the search engine marketing industry? For one, Bing ranking guidelines will become increasingly important. If more site owners begin to use paid search on YaBing, I assume there will be more of a requirement to become certified in PPC management for Bing, and not just Google. Also, SEM experts use the link and link domain metrics for Yahoo to quickly measure backlinks. This will now also be influenced by the importance of Bing’s metrics.
I think this could help Bing gain market share; but to really compete with Google or to loosen the stronghold that it has, there needs to be way more innovation by Bing. So far, they have done a great job in search, but it is hard to compete when Google is diversifying its efforts and getting people to use them for every online need they might have i.e. a full service search engine.
2 Comments
YaBing! (as you coined it) will need to score heavily on relevancy front to capture the ‘mindshare’ that Google currently enjoys. Google has become a habit which can only be replaced by another utility offering radical improvements in information quality in search results.
I can’t say I’m satisfied with the Bing search engine results, the results are not very accurate unfortunately.