News about our Search Alliance with Microsoft
Today we issued a press release announcing that we’ve received clearance from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission for our search agreement with Microsoft. Now that we’re full steam ahead, I’d like to share what we at Yahoo! see as an exciting opportunity to focus on creating new ways for people to search online.
Today’s Yahoo! Search:
First, let’s take a step back and explain what this alliance means for people who search with Yahoo! Most of the things you see on the typical Yahoo! Search results page below will not immediately change as a result of this alliance. What will change is that the basic search listings and ads will be provided by Microsoft instead of our own back-end platform – those are the text and links that you see in the left-hand image.
However, as you can see highlighted in the right-hand image, Yahoo! will continue to enhance the search result listings as we do for people today. A few examples of this are:
1) Providing you with rich results that display the most relevant information from Yahoo!’s rich content properties, as well as other great product, local, entertainment, reference, social and tech sites.
2) Showing specific results from vertical search products, like Yahoo! News.
3) Providing handy tools on the left-side of the page, such as our Search Pad and Search Scan apps, site filters that help you refine and explore the search results more easily, and related search term suggestions to help you refine your search further if the results aren’t quite what you were looking for.
Tomorrow’s Yahoo! Search:
And what you’re seeing today is just the tip of the iceberg. With Microsoft providing us the underlying list of search results, our Yahoo! team can now focus on making the overall experience of finding stuff online and getting things done easier for you – whether you’re searching at yahoo.com or just looking for specific information in the moment while using our many great products and properties on any device. We have lots of ideas for things we can do to help you with three main aspects of searching:
• Ways to find things faster when you’re just starting your search – by continuing to enhance our great Search Assist technology and also weaving search more deeply and conveniently into other Yahoo! products.
• New ways to help you explore the things that matter most – whether that’s with more rich results and options for organizing the search results page, or by showing you interesting Search topics that you might want to browse through in other relevant places that you spend your time on Yahoo!
• More apps and other tools to help you get things done as quickly as possible. We know that people don’t want to search per se – you want to complete tasks in your day, and we’ll be inventing new ways to help you do that.
I’m very excited about the opportunities ahead and hope all of you will come along with us for the ride. Go to Yahoo! Search today, try out a few searches, and give us feedback. If you have questions about the alliance, we’ve posted more information at the official search alliance Website, on our Yahoo! Search Marketing blog, and on the Yahoo! Developer’s Network blog.
Shashi Seth
Senior Vice President, Yahoo! Search Products
What’s going to happen to the Yahoo! Search APIs? Will BOSS start returning results from Microsoft’s search?
–Kent
> Go to Yahoo! Search today, try out a few searches, and give us feedback.
To be clear, this is not being powered by Bing now, correct?
Yes please clarify. Are Bing organic results now live on Yahoo?
Will yahoo old search index will hold any place in new search result.
So if Yahoo! And MS are so chummy, why can’t I pull my yahoo mail account into Windows Mail without paying for a plus account. Excited about the new search engine potential.
Will the partnership provide something similar to adsense also ?
Is Microsoft going to adapt to Yahoo’s UI? As it is now, some things in AdCenter need to be done at the ad group level whereas the current Yahoo UI is easier to manage. Any ideas?
So how closely will search results from Yahoo eventually align or be exactly the same as what we get when searching Bing? Also how long will it take until that transition is complete and we are seeing results like that?
So will there be a way to measure the ad or website relevance? Will you share information vital to ensuring fair placement of ads. Or does it boil down to how much money advertisers give you? I personally have had a bad experience with Bing. To elaborate, my search query never brings me relevant websites. It just seems to not really be in tune with the end user. Who is benefiting the most with this “Search Alliance”? As a search engine, are you going to make relevance the number one factor? I ask this because I don’t always find what I am looking for when I use Yahoo or Bing. RELEVANCE, RELEVANCE, RELEVANCE!! Then you got a winner!
Will this bring Yahoo and Bing search together?
The new search features would be interesting to go through.
So when the actual search is powered by Bing technology, will the results be identical in both search engines for a given query?
What kind of new apps and tools will they have specifically?
I think it’s a great thing that two of the biggest companies have united together to provide quality services (searching) to the users. This way not only would the user get more quality but even the two of you would earn more out of it. If you put all ur efforts into it I think it’s not difficult to take over the search business from big G.
I think yahoo is doing great in terms of competing with page indexing compared to bing and google
Yes, yahoo is doing great compared to bing but google still seems to be ahead of the game. I do like the user options with yahoo, they are better than google, i think.
Im glad yahoo is taking some of the power back when it comes to online searches, Im so sick of google pushing people around just because they can.
All the power to you Yahoo!
The search results for news in Yahoo is so interesting and easier.
I think it will be good. in order to be more powerful, make an alliance is a good idea.
I did not realize. It explains why google tried to imitate bing’s background images?
Search results in yahoo should gain more friends in the user community. They are sometimes better than other results especialty in our voice over business…
I think personally that this alliance is a good idea. Yahoo and Microsoft are both powerful companies and complementary. When shall we see all these new features ?
is the alliance still on? I saw rumors of YPN being shut down?