Yahoo Search is Dead

Yahoo search died today. If all goes well, Microsoft's search engine called Bing will be taking over Yahoo Search. Microsoft launched Bing two months ago and currently owns 8 percent of the U.S. search market.

This partnership/takeover is a way for both Microsoft and Yahoo to fight against Google who owns 65 percent of the U.S. search market.

In the deal, Microsoft will provide the search engine and Yahoo will provide their experience in selling advertising. In terms of payment, Yahoo will get 88 percent of the search advertising revenues on Yahoo owned sites every year for the next 5 years.

This is good for Microsoft since they don't have to pay anything upfront and they immediately get ad selling experience and access from Yahoo. From the looks of it, Yahoo might be getting the bad end of the deal as they only get paid on searches in Yahoo sites while Microsoft gets paid on every search whether Yahoo or Bing albeit only 12% on Yahoo sites. But easy enough for Microsoft to eventually draw users to Bing instead of Yahoo in the future.

Once Microsoft gets all the knowledge, database and access to Yahoo customers, guess where that leaves Yahoo?

I feel sorry for Yahoo. It was such a great site when it started. I remember using it all the time before Google came along. I stopped using Yahoo when they concentrated more on being a portal than a search engine. They started outsourcing their search engine to Inktomi, then to Google, then bought out Inktomi to have more control of their search and compete with Google.

The main problem with Yahoo for me was that it was too busy. It like it better when it was simple back in 1995, even the 1997 page was still ok. But when they started adding more stuff to their page in 2000, I started looking to other search engines.

I also found Google's search result to be better than Yahoo's. Who knows, maybe in a the next 5 years, I might switch to Bing.