Microsoft, Yahoo, Bing - and Google...

The latest news is that Microsofy and Yahoo have finally announced a tie-in.

Essentially Yahoo has given up on its own search product, and quite rightly so since the results it returns in my humble opinion are almost uniformally terrible, the best sites often have little presence and there is lots of dross and irrelevance in their results. Indeed if you ever moan about the relevance of Google results, do the same search on Yahoo and you will realise that things could be a whole lot worse.

So will this Microsoft / Yahoo deal signal anything momentous?

Well, not really... unless Microsoft can improve Bing and make the results better. Almost no impression has been made to the dominance of Google by Bing, so when it powers Yahoo too it is hard to see why that would make a difference. People have a big inertia to change, and so it will have to be clear not just that results are better, but that they are consistently so, for people in the UK to switch where Google is so dominant. And not only that, people will need to think that Google has stopped returning relevant results. Both of those seem unlikely to happen any time soon.

Re : Microsoft, Yahoo, Bing - and Google

Personally the fact that two companies work together rather than going it alone doesn't make me any more inclined to use their services. I would only do so if I heard anecdotally from friends/colleagues etc that they've used those search engines and found it on a regular basis to return better results than google.

Until that ever happens, and let's face it it may well not, then I wouldn't be interested in any search engine and whoever does or doesn't run it.

Chris

Re : Microsoft, Yahoo, Bing - and Google

I applaud their efforts however - neither seem to have recovered from the fact that google have taken over so quickly, and maintained that dominance for the last several years.

Nothing lasts forever though, does it!