Yahoo's Bing Deal Puts Delicious, BOSS & More at Risk
Multiple reports tonight say that Microsoft and Yahoo! will announce a deal tomorrow wherein Microsoft's Bing will become the new Yahoo! search engine and Yahoo! will sell ads against those search results on its site. There's a whole lot of money in play, but as users we don't think that's the most interesting part of this story. There may be some very interesting consequences, both positive and negative, for innovation - our favorite part of the online experience. Our guess is that it will be a net negative for forward-looking web users.
Bing's new substantial market share will put new pressure on Google to step up to the plate and wow us again, but the likely loss of Yahoo's own search work could be a major loss for the web at large. There are some awesome projects underway at Yahoo! Search and the people who work on them have to be concerned about the future of their jobs and work. We're worried too, we really like the things they've made for us to use.
New Competitive Pressure from Bing
The Google search experience has been slow and steady in terms of visible evolution over the years. The team there is, no doubt, always working to improve the search product - but few bold moves have really been taken. The introduction of multi-media into search results has been great, the search wiki product has just been pointless clutter, the voice search on the iPhone is cool.
AdAge reports that ComScore shows Bing will now have a 28% market share when combined with Yahoo! search, though. Google must have felt competitive pressure from Bing before this deal, but now the pressure will really be on to differentiate and strengthen the Google search brand.
BOSS, Delicious, Search Monkey: What Will Happen to Them?
Search is more than web search at yahoo.com, and Bing does more than just web search at Bing.com. Ads are sold against it all, and we expect that the Bing takeover of Yahoo Search will be extensive.
Yahoo! gets criticized a lot from a business perspective, and the company launches some pretty hokey products, but a lot of the work going on there is fabulous. Yahoo's search team has done more than almost any other major vendor in the market to support the open standards and semantic web work that we love so much. Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service and Search Monkey markup are incredibly innovative. (See also And Nerds Became Kings: Yahoo! To Announce Semantic Web Support.)
Social bookmarking service Delicious, one of the last era's most heartbreaking symbols of untapped potential in social media, is in the search department. Why stay on top of the care and feeding of Delicious, which was helping feed Yahoo! Search results, if Yahoo! isn't doing its own search any more?
If Yahoo Maps gets touched by the deal, that means the future of potential-rich projects like the Yahoo! Location Database have to be in question. Maps is in the search department, as is the wonderful Yahoo! News product. Here's the list of everything that falls under search at Yahoo!.
Update: Yahoo PR just called us to say that the list we linked to above, which is linked off the search.yahoo.com page, is a consumer facing list of search-related services, like News Search and Map Search, but most of those are not or are no longer formally part of the Search Department. They had no comment about the looming shadow of Bing, but again - Bing does almost all of those things themselves as search functions, and Yahoo may end up selling ads against the Bing versions on Yahoo.com.
It's possible that all of these Yahoo search-type projects will remain in operation, but it sure seems unlikely. Maybe they weren't changing the world like good old search advertising has, anyway.
Bing is exciting as an effective challenger to Google, but if that competition comes at the cost of cannibalizing Yahoo's innovative search work - then we won't be so excited about Bing any more. Maybe the most developer-savvy Yahoo Search team members will go breathe more life into the Bing developer community, and maybe they'll be able to get more traction there. We'll still shed a little tear for any of our favorite Yahoo projects that get run over in this deal.
Update 2: It's Official: Microsoft and Yahoo Announce Search Deal
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I'm not sure how related del.icio.us is to search. But I think Yahoo has needed, for quite some time, to think long and hard about what they really plan to do with it!
The deal would make Microsoft a credible competitor to Google. Bing is already in news for some incredible search product it is going to launch. I am waiting to see if the Yahoo-Microsoft deal is going to match the speculations.
Jeremy, Delicious is definitely a part of Yahoo Search, unfortunately.
Do we need to start printing up "Save Delicious" bumper stickers?
If Delicious was chiefly striving to aid Yahoo! results, the disconnection might actually not be a bad thing.
No worries. Microsoft will evolve Bing into yet another service that tries to be everything to everybody, thereby permeating your search experience with so much crap that after a few months you'll never want to use the service again. By then, they'll have a new, shiny carrot to dangle in front of people's noses. Business as usual in Redmond.
Delicious is such a disappointment. It still loads incredibly slowly. I've lost way too much time over the years if you add it all up.
You certainly can't tap social potential when your users are sitting there and waiting for you to load.
Still, I've got a bunch of links on there. As long as I don't lose those I'm good.
But I'm currently switching over to Diigo for a lot of my linking since it doesn't slow me down and the post to blog feaure actually works as opposed to the Delicious approach of loading slowly and not posting to my blogs.
That said, it's always disheartening to watch potentially great projects decline. Definitely an interesting angle on the Yahoo/Bing relationship.
On what I hope appears to be a related note, I use Yahoo Business email, have multiple accounts and have been having login problems for months now as they attempt to socialize their email service with functions that I don't want.
I use Yahoo hosting for my first site (netweed.com, yay!) and have found them great in some respects but unreliable in others.
I used to really dig Yahoo even though I inherently distrust large corporate enterprises. Now I'm just dealing with lock-in and a company that continues to disappoint.
Wish my Ad Age column I wrote last week was already out. Raised same issues. Yahoo News? That's got search. What happens there? Yahoo Shopping? Go on and on, search is throughout Yahoo. We wait to see.
Being upset about what would happen to things that have a horrible track record, and that can still be integrated with Bing, if Yahoo so wants it is quite strange.
But even if they don't get integrated and Yahoo maintains them separated from Bing. Nothing would be truly lost.
Sorry but that is the truth.
Be mad if they suddenly close Yahoo Pipes or ditch all their YUL and YUI work, etc.
If this happens, this will be a sad day for open web. Not because MS is evil, but because Yahoo was providing so much of extremely valuable infrastructure.
However, this _also_ means a lot of space for new startups.
And I know many Yahoo guys at those services that are as smart as it gets and I am sure they'll continue to create great stuff be it in search or somewhere else!
Bye
Andraz Tori
I think Delicious is safe and if not they would sell it I suspect.
The boss and yql stuff is another question, will yahoo keep its indexed data alive when its using bing? will bing use this data too? There are far to many questions around this.
I wonder how much the search stuff costs yahoo's bottom line.
I think they should buy AOL with the money from MS.
Microsoft has never understood the semantic web or embraced RDF, and with Ray Ozzie involved, it will never embrace anything "open". Management at Yahoo is now only concerned with the bottom line, not innovation. Search Monkey is definitely at risk, and I imagine most of the other innovative Yahoo products will be at risk, too.
Why do I feel that in the last year, we've taken giant leaps backward?
Alas, I think you're probably right. Yahoo! does have a lot of real innovation around search (SearchMonkey being a good example), but clearly that isn't what Microsoft are interested in. Regarding del.icio.us, maybe it's time to move across to Twine.
Wow! Finally Microsoft has reached a deal Yahoo for an internet search partnership. Will the newly announced deal between giants Microsoft and Yahoo be a good thing? Got to wait and see. But atleast Microsoft and Yahoo deal is straightforward and not complex at all and ofcourse, the negotiation talks have been going for long. I was just curious to know all the past negotiations between Microsoft and Yahoo so collected all the articles and links (more than 200) related to the current merger and the previous events or negotiations between Microsoft and Yahoo. If you are interested check the link below.
http://markthispage.blogspot.com/2009/07/saga-of-microsoft-and-yahoo-from-2007.html
I wasn't aware Yahoo! was doing anything with delicious. A design realignment every three years or so doesn't qualify as continued innovation -- I'm not sure they remember what they purchased. Maybe [loosing search] would actually get them thinking about advancing other projects / properties.
[I think Delicious is safe and if not they would sell it I suspect.
The boss and yql stuff is another question, will yahoo keep its indexed data alive when its using bing? will bing use this data too? There are far to many questions around this.
I wonder how much the search stuff costs yahoo's bottom line.
I think they should buy AOL with the money from MS.]
I think.
I'm not sure I see where startup room comes in, Andraz. I guess in general a massively-powerful company buys one of the key players in a market, and one of few contenders to offer much competition, there's less breathing room over all. Maybe I see search as an oliagopoly, because of the overwhelming presence of a very few big players... To make a mark, the innovation has to be VERY compelling. Maybe the innovation we're looking for is from outside search?
Yahoo's R&D has been very impressive, and I hope, like you say, that they continue even as individual efforts. But that's a set-back of time and resources for quite a while still.
Posted by: https://creativecommons.net/zach/
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July 29, 2009 1:52 PM
@zach:
I don't think there will be any breathing room for "classical general search companies". Start-ups can't play any role there for foreseeable future.
However if Yahoo drops search & ad targeting and becomes media company only, many other assets loose strategical value for them - BOSS, yahoo maps apis, fireeagle, searchmonkey and many other APIs.
For example BOSS being default goto service for whoever needs "search as SaaS" leaves a space for someone to fill in.
The real question is: Yahoo being without search, what's their long-term strategical goal?
bye
Andraz Tori
@andraz,
Yep, I see what you mean. I guess what I'm getting at is a big infrastructure hit to these projects already backed by Yahoo. So, if SearchMonkey goes (for example), is there going to be a startup ready to take its place? If so, is it going to have the staffing and resources to carry on at the level Yahoo was able to support?
I can see that startups and innovation will flourish, sort of no matter what the biggest folk do, and if there's something truly innovative in this area, it will eventually get discovered. But, in the meantime, I think of this as a net loss because it has the potential to kill off current, active work in the area.
Viva la startup, but don't kill off the establishment—let them be disrupted instead.
Posted by: https://creativecommons.net/zach/
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July 30, 2009 6:37 AM
this will shake up search results for the unlucky ones who couldn't make top search results for bing, but was able to with yahoo...
who cares about delicious when diigo is already SO much better?
No worries. Microsoft will evolve Bing into yet another service that tries to be everything to everybody, thereby permeating your search experience with so much crap that after a few months you'll never want to use the service again. By then, they'll have a new, shiny carrot to dangle in front of people's noses. Business as usual in Redmond.
Very nice post with lots of interesting comments
Thank you !
@andraz,
Yep, I see what you mean. I guess what I'm getting at is a big infrastructure hit to these projects already backed by Yahoo. So, if SearchMonkey goes (for example), is there going to be a startup ready to take its place? If so, is it going to web tasarımı have the staffing and resources to carry on at the level Yahoo was able to support?
I can see that startups and innovation will flourish, sort of no matter what the biggest folk do, and if there's something truly innovative in this area, it will eventually get discovered. But, in the meantime, I think of this as a net loss because it has the potential to kill off current, active work in the area.
Viva la startup, but don't kill off the establishment—let them be disrupted instead.
What of Yahoo! News, Delicious, BOSS & More? Innovation & the Microsoft Deal http://bit.ly/lZITj [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/2902896522]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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August 11, 2009 10:27 AM
noooo
Posted by: Gaith
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August 11, 2009 1:36 PM
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I would say bing and yahoo as separate search engines is better competition than just bing?
http://www.kittycompare.co.uk/
We like adcenter for the great conversion rates of Bing’s traffic.. With Yahoo though we are forced to buy clicks from junk partners that send nothing but fake clicks.. It’s a daily job to monitor all the new bad-domains to block.. And you have to PAY for all that.. :P
With the current merge of Yahoo and Bing let’s hope the new “team” will do it RIGHT by giving the advertisers the choice to pay only for real yahoo/bing searches.. just like Adwords and adcenter allow (for now?).
Just my 2 cents
Cheers!