Microsoft & Yahoo! Search Deal Final!

After months of speculation, finally Yahoo and Microsoft search and online advertising deal is now official.

As per Yahoo’s Carol Bartz:

"This agreement comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo!, our users, and the industry, and I believe it establishes the foundation for a new era of Internet innovation and development. Users will continue to experience search as a vital part of their Yahoo! experiences and will enjoy increased innovation thanks to the scale and resources this deal provides. Advertisers will also benefit from scale and enjoy greater ease of use and efficiencies working with a single platform and sales team for premium advertisers. Finally, this deal will help us increase our investments in priority areas in winning audience properties, display advertising capabilities and mobile experiences."

And Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has this to say:

"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. Success in search requires both innovation and scale. With our new Bing search platform, we’ve created breakthrough innovation and features. This agreement with Yahoo! will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness. Microsoft and Yahoo! know there’s so much more that search could be. This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search."

The companies have also established a website at http://www.choicevalueinnovation.com to provide consumers, advertisers and publishers with additional information about the benefits of the agreement.

From SEM and SEO point of view the key points to note are:

1. The deal will be complete by next year (2010) only.
2. Yahoo Publisher Network will probably be closed down. So we will only have adcenter and adwords to worry about.
3. Bing will become No.2 Search engine and by default Yahoo, Alltheweb, Altavista, Inktomi etc will be powered by Bing.
4. The deal will initially be for 10 years

More to come from the live conference which is happening right now. Read more at Yahoo! official blog: http://ycorpblog.com/2009/07/29/what-our-microsoft-deal-means-to-you

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!