News: Microsoft and Yahoo join forces to take on Google

Today it was announced that Microsoft and Yahoo will be joining forces in the area of search.  Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft will power Yahoo's search engine.  What this means is that the search results from Yahoo search will now be powered by Microsoft's new Bing search engine.  This is pretty big news, as Microsoft and Yahoo have always been two of the the "Big Three" competitors in the search arena.  Google of course is the third player in this space and the dominant market leader.

More specifically, what does this "Microhoo" search partnership mean for users like you and me?

From PC Magazine.com:

I'll be more impressed when I no longer have to learn how to ask questions to a search engine and it instead knows how to interperet my own natural queries better.  :)

I still find Google searh to return more relevent, better organized search results than either Yahoo search or Bing search.

And face it, people look at you funny when you say you are going to go "Bing" something or "Yahoo" something..

tclaremont:

people look at you funny when you say you are going to go "Bing" something or "Yahoo" something.

That could change in a flash, couldn't it? Afterall, who would have guessed that "Google" would become such an easily recognized verb...?!

I will worry about creating the crafty query,  but how about search results that don't include search results from other search engines or other portals sites, and eliminate end sites that look like they are dynamically creating a web page crafted from your specific search request?

Dave

I hear ya, Dave. Nowadays you can create a search using eight different non-sequitors and sure enough there will be a page of results that turn out to be nothing more than random words.

In the beginning (or is that Bing-ining) Bing promised that the search results would improve over time based on the logging of the perceived success rates of user searches. To be blunt, I have found the search results to be summarilly worsening since Bing was released.

I may be wrong, but my perception is that people dont care what search engine they are using, as long as the results are relevent. People dont care if it is Google, or Yahoo or Microsoft or Dogpile or whatever.

I do about 20 searches a day. Google is still the leader for me. I doubt if I am the minority, and I doubt that I am the only one observing the downward trend in quality from Bing.

tclaremont:

In the beginning (or is that Bing-ining) Bing promised that the search results would improve over time based on the logging of the perceived success rates of user searches. To be blunt, I have found the search results to be summarilly worsening since Bing was released.

One of the ways I use search I never click on a result but find the information I need in the preview snippets included on the results page.  It is also one of the easiest spell checkers to check the spelling of one word.

Some topics searched on delivers very precise direct results with a quality answer,  other searches will result in obscured and diluted results from the random word pages, and even from some pages that seem to build their content from the search.  Many times I see this when searching for common consumer items, you will find hundreds of pages offering to sell you the item, but few that really tell you about the item, and often the manufacturer's page is not to be found in the results or buried pages deep under lots of noise.  Unfortunately it seems to good results are getting buried under this noise, and I wonder if the search structure will collapse under this and end up not giving any valuable results at all.

Dave

dwelp:

One of the ways I use search I never click on a result but find the information I need in the preview snippets included on the results page.  It is also one of the easiest spell checkers to check the spelling of one word.

Some topics searched on delivers very precise direct results with a quality answer,  ...  [while] some pages that seem to build their content from the search

Dave,

I use the search function  that way too.  I also find that if there is some quality info in the snippet, you can pretty much count on the fact that the page itself has some real quality; while the ones that are generated by the search themselves have no or very little info. However, I am also finding that I can often tell from the URL which page might be more likely to have bona fide info.

As the engines and advertisers get more sophisticated, so do we.

Sasha

.

Google is still the leader for me too.

But it's important for those involved in SEO and Web development to stay informed on how this new Yahoo-Microsoft search alliance will impact your site optimization efforts.  Some questions people should be asking themselves at this time:

- How will this new development affect my current SEO efforts?
- What best practices will I need to consider when optimizing my site for the new Yahoo "powered by Bing" search engine?
- Is my site currently listed on Bing?  How is it performing?

Ultimately, how these changes play out may not be significant.  Even so, if you operate a website it's always a good idea to stay informed of new developments and trends in the industry.

For those new to Bing, a good first step would be to visit the Bing Webmaster Center, that offers free tools and support for making sure the search engine likes your site.

Yann

I have no particular reason for it, but I have always avoided Yahoo!, and I have not liked to see various vendors, applications and services add, or try to add, the Yahoo! toolbar to my browser. (Does anybody know how to get HP's donation of Yahoo! search off of an HP laptop's Vista taskbar?) With this deal, I will be more careful than before to avoid Yahoo!.

Google is the most influential sites now a days and I think Yahoo and microsoft would have a hard on replacing Google to the number 1 rank

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Jesse, get Spybot Search & Destroy from http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html and after installing/configuring it, go to the Tools: BHOs section. Then select the Yahoo! toolbar entry and select Remove from the menu.  If you have Vista or Windows 7, you'll need to run Spybot as an admin.

EDIT: You can also try Programs and Features in the Control Panel and uninstalling it there.