Pub Perspectives: Bing and Yahoo

The Publishing world has been all stirred up over the proposed controversial partnership of Yahoo and Bing (Microsoft) search engines. The partnership motives of course are to consolidate and leverage the two internet giant’s resources and efforts in such a way that will provide a better footing and overall position to compete with the dominant Google Search engines.

Google the obvious giant and market share leader, alleged by some to be a search engine monopoly, has a huge market share advantage over the search industry. Approximately 6 out of 10 searches are executed by a Google search engine. Yahoo comes a distant second with a little more then 1 out of every 5 or 6 searches, they have about 20 or so percent and Microsoft’s new engine known as Bing has approximately 10 or so percent. The easiest way to view these splits is to cut out the other small engines out of the picture, they compose the reaming 2-4 percent of searches, then you have the following approximate splits:

  • Google – 60%
  • Yahoo – 20%
  • Microsoft/Bing – 10%

The proposed partnership would create the following consolidated splits:

  • Google -  70%
  • Bing/Yahoo – 30%

This still leaves Google as the obvious dominant search provider. But the 30% share that is obtained by the Bing and Yahoo partnership makes things much more interesting. Many folks still laugh at the notion of this partnership providing any sort of real opportunity to eat into Google’s share of the search market. But the partnership of which so many are quick to cast doubts upon could make things interesting down the road. Taking a unbiased look and honest consideration of the new opportunities generated by these two large and powerful Internet media advertising and software giants becoming one… well one on one front at least. Both Yahoo and Microsoft will stay separate entities but they will become one on everything Google does.

If you ask me this is a great opportunity for yahoo and Microsoft to take significant ground away from Google and even overtake the market share lead. Most of you folks reading this are about to click a new link, search box, or hopefully just getting a head start to your comment reply of which you plan on calling this notion nonsense. But hear me out.

  • Yahoo will not have to spend those countless dollars on search engine development which has historically just been mismanaged any how.
  • Bing will triple there search volume. By the way bing will get 12% of the revenue generated by yahoo searches.
  • Yahoo will be able to continue to improve there sales figures and sales team performance which is already doing really well. They will no doubt handle the efforts of Microsoft’s sales which can only improve with the expertise of yahoo’s current sales operations.
  • Yahoo will also have enormous resources that it can either pocket or perhaps the wiser decision would be to focus in on the user networks and content media portions of their business. I think perhaps a real and legitimate blogging platform would be a wise decision and perhaps running it along side the yahoo answers forums that are oh so popular. There is huge potential there.
  • I think Microsoft could really help fine tune the innovative nature of yahoo. Bill Gates is Bill Gates because he can do and has proved over and over that he can and will do anything you can do and will do it better. Yes he Can. He is a master of optimizing performance and operations given that there is some sort of groomed playing field with some basic structure and ground rules. He will do it here as well. Why wouldn’t he.
  • The environment is just right for Microsoft. They need to diversify there business model as paying for software is dieing, this is a good thing in terms of motivation. Also Apple and Google are starting to play with an emotional handicap. They are letting the success of bill gates get under their skin to say the least. Advantage Microsoft.

To sum this all up the strengths and weaknesses of yahoo and Microsoft compliment each other so elegantly that the first hint of opportunity to gain on Google will not be missed. I am a strong believer that Google will stay a step ahead even on their worst days when it comes to innovation and development. But when it comes to sport and business, Bill Gates wins. This is Bill’s game.

There are also talks now that Microsoft is working deals across the news content firms around the country about paying for the right to use and index their content exclusively. This would obviously have a huge impact on the search engine world. I have also noticed that Microsoft publishing network seems to have been ramping up. I wonder if they will take a more publisher friendly approach then Google who seems to rule by fear.

My 36-72 month forecast in terms of stock:

Buy Microsoft .

Sell Google.

Hold/Buy Apple and Yahoo

Advertising and Marketing

August 11, 2009  Tags: , , , , , , , ,   Posted in: Pub Perspectives, Uncategorized

3 Responses

  1. Jimmy Sia - November 2, 2009

    i have been using the BING search engine for a couple of weeks. it seems to be as good as Google but for some reason i would still want to stick with Google search engine.

  2. Financial News - Young Finance Guy - December 4, 2009

    I think that the Bing search engine will do well as we watch this competition of search engines unfold. Though I think Yahoo made the right decision to join up with Microsoft I think they gave away the goods. the commitment seems irresponsible to yahoo shareholders.

    great article here

  3. Heather May - January 18, 2010

    my default search engine is Yahoo but now i am using BING because it is much better than Yahoo. i heard that Bing search engine would power Yahoo search also.

Leave a Reply