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« Best Buy, Twelpforce, and Crowdsourcing a Brand | Main | Managing Online Reputation - Some Simple Guidance » Microhoo -- Yahoo Goes Bing!Posted by Rich Goldsmith on July 30, 2009 at July 30, 2009 5:01 PMA 60 percent market share is generally considered gargantuan. In some circles, it'd be tagged as nigh-monopolistic. And given that it's the percentage of the search market Google owns, Microsoft has every reason to be concerned. Its 8 percent search market share has forced the company to search for an answer to its growing online irrelevance for several years. This quixotic search was what led to the company's $47 billion bid to buy Yahoo! last year. Now it has led Microsoft to partner with the company instead. And while it may seem fairly innocuous for Yahoo! to agree to swap out its own search engine for Microsoft's Bing search technology, believe it or not this is a deal that could make interactive marketers and social media wonks very happy, despite the depressing toll taken on Yahoo! shareholders. Whether it's TCP/IP, HTML or SQL, standards make the internet more usable. That's one of the side effects of this deal - increased standardization. Because 90 percent of searches will now be conducted on only two systems - Google and Bing - that means one less search algorithm for SEO systems to take into consideration. Plus, rather than managing paid search placements on three systems, marketers will only have to deal with two. Paid placement expenses may remain the same, since the deal won't likely affect the volume of searches, but the management and administration time and costs will likely be reduced, if only marginally. There is a danger, of course. Any further homogenization will impact the competition between the search titans and advertising prices will likely skyrocket. But in the current market, with the newly minted Microhoo (or Yacrosoft, if you prefer) conglomeration looking to take chunks out of Google's hide and the global economy still croaking out a Monty Python-esque "I'm not dead yet," companies looking to launch cheap and effective ad campaigns could clean up -- even with the larger concentration of companies jockeying for keywords in the shrunken marketplace. *In the interest of full disclosure - we work for Microsoft on a project completely unrelated to the company's search business.
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