Microsoft and Yahoo have both agreed to sign a 10 year deal for Microsoft’s Bing to power Yahoo’s searches. Their main goal is at “changing the search landscape.” This deal means that Bing will be powering Yahoo’s searches and Yahoo, in return, will be selling premium advertising for both Yahoo and Microsoft and sharing the revenue between them.
Microsoft has big plans for the future of Bing and Yahoo through this deal and wants to make searching on the web more efficient and better value for advertising.
"Through this agreement with Yahoo, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers, and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company,” says Ballmer.
"Success in search requires both innovation and scale. This agreement with Yahoo will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness." he concludes. The financial details of the deal are not clear; however neither company had anything bad to say about the implications.
However, this is not the first time that Microsoft has tried to buy Yahoo! They tried to make them an offer of a huge sum of $44.6 billion back in February 2008, but their former chief executive Jerry Yang declined their proposal and the deal seemed to fade away. Since then, Yang has been replaced with Carol Bartz and claimed that any partner trying to make a search deal, they are going to need “boat loads of money and solid technology”.
Microsoft now has the technology to carry this deal through, which leaves the money. When reports of the deal first became public, there were rumours that Microsoft would offer Yahoo $3 billion, however there has been no mention by the companies of money being exchanged upfront.
Analysts have warned that antitrust regulators could possibly stop the merging of the second and third ranked search engines in the world. For example, Google and Yahoo had to drop plans of forming an advertising partnership in 2008 due to the US Department of Justice.
Hopefully this will be a step forward in the search engine world!
