E.U. and U.S. regulators today approved the merger deal between Yahoo and Microsoft with no conditions. The agreement, announced last summer, will allow Bing’s search engine to power Yahoo’s search results.

Under the deal, Bing provides the list of links for every Yahoo search, freeing Yahoo from the expenses of running huge web spidering and indexing computer centers. In return, Yahoo will take over the search advertising efforts for Microsoft and pay a slice of Yahoo’s search ad revenues to Microsoft.

Yahoo’s fortunes have been waning in the last few years, and has seen its search share sliding. Microsoft attempted to purchase Yahoo for $45 billion ($31 per share), but Yahoo founder and then CEO Jerry Yang spurned the offer. Microsoft’s search efforts had floundered until it released Bing last summer, which has proven to be a surprisingly robust and innovative competitor.

Google currently retains an estimated 70 percent of the U.S. share of search. Bets on how much this will affect that figure?

Via Wired.com

Grant Brissey covered everything from hard news and technology, to music, film, and visual arts during his time working for The Stranger. Grant's work has also appeared at Geekwire, and in Billboard,...

14 replies on “Meanwhile on the Internet”

  4. Microsoft will soon tie in Bing/Yahoo into the operating system. Much they way they tied Explorer into the operating system, which dramatically reduced any real competition. They’ll pass Google within 5 years.

  5. By 2011 Google will have 13% of search, Bing will have 4%. The leader will be that search box at the top of Slog with 81% of all search.

  8. I’m wearing some shoes, delivered today, that I found using Bing after searching exhaustively on Google—or however exhausted you can get sitting in front of a computer…er, at work. I’m still using Google out of habit, but I thought I’d share.

  9. Microsoft is just bleeding, cause Google is eating their shorts online for Office, and nobody cares about Outlook any more in these Netbook iPad iPhone days.

    So, no, this won’t save their butt, and Google’s fate is not that impacted.

  13. One of the frustrations of working in search is the media love of Google and the public’s loyalty to the intangibles of the Google experience.

    What do I mean by “Intangible”? Well, going back years, if you took Google search results and competitor search results, and switched the templates of the page, users would declare the results with the Google template to be better and more accurate.

    In perfectly blind tests, they’ve been selecting non-Google results as superior for several years.

    A few more launches like “Buzz” and maybe they can shake a bit of that loyalty.

  14. @10: Thanks for asking, 5280. And Will, I’m actually having the baby at home, so no trips to and from the hospital. At least, I hope I’ll have a baby sometime. I might be pregnant forever. Our attempts to induce labor were exhausting and fruitless, so I remain on bedrest through Monday, barring any unforeseen crisis. In the meantime my blood pressure rises daily, I can’t walk up or down stairs to even do my own damn laundry, and I spend my days trolling Slog and staring out the window at the beautiful weather and the people who are allowed to actually walk around in it. I vaguely remember exercise.

    My biggest fear is having to go to the hospital, which will become necessary if my blood pressure reaches a certain point. I have no health insurance, didn’t qualify for state aid, and if I have to go to the hospital we’ll very likely have no choice but to declare bankruptcy. This thought does nothing to improve the blood pressure.

    Anyway, no drowning my pity party in booze, so 5280, I trust I can count on you to suck up some extra whiskey in my honor, eh?

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