RIP Yahoo search, hello Bing

July 30, 2009 4:00 AM PDT

Yahoo's long nightmare is over, having finally offloaded its search business to Microsoft after years of rumors, negotiations and reversals. Now all it has to do is figure out what comes next.

A new era at Yahoo began the minute CEO Carol Bartz signed the paperwork turning over the right to conduct searches on Yahoo's huge network of Web sites to Microsoft in exchange for 88 percent of the revenue generated by Microsoft's Bing. Now Yahoo is first and foremost a media company, in the business of attracting as many people to its properties as possible in hopes of selling lucrative ad deals on those pages.

This strategy has not always worked on the Internet. Search advertising has been far and away the most effective way for advertisers to reach their audiences, and they have responded by pouring money into the coffers of the company that has best combined relevant search results and efficient advertising: Google.

But Bartz seems to have decided that Yahoo doesn't have the ability or the will to take on Google directly, arguing that the company should focus on what it does best and leave the technology to others. While that probably came as a bit of a surprise to the many engineers working on search technology inside Yahoo, Bartz hasn't exactly been hiding her intentions for Yahoo over the past eight months.

"We're not a search company," Bartz said flat-out in June, discussing how Yahoo is a different company than Google or Microsoft. Now that she's made that distinction official, what is Yahoo?

"It's where people find relevant and contextual information," Bartz said in May at the D: All Things Digital conference, clearly having envisioned a post-search Yahoo. "It's news, it's sports...home page, mail. It's a fabulous place."

That's a content company, turning the focus to how Yahoo should produce the kind of content and services that will keep existing users coming back for more and attract new ones to the site. Some began to wonder on Wednesday if Yahoo just turned itself into a bigger, purpler AOL.

On the services side, some areas, like Yahoo Mail, Flickr, and Messenger, are clearly where Yahoo is unlikely to take its foot off the gas pedal. Same for Yahoo's mobile strategy, a part of the Internet that is very much up for grabs, unlike the more mature PC-oriented Internet experience.

So Yahoo isn't getting out of the technology business entirely. Yahoo will continue to need ways to keep its new home page hooked into the wider world of social networking, real-time communication, and things we haven't even thought of yet, and that will require smart, savvy engineering.

But on the content side, Yahoo will have to figure out whether it needs to expand its current offerings, pare down some of the less frequently used products, or tap the outsourcing strategy in this area as well. There's been quite a lot of turnover in recent years at Yahoo, but there are probably enough people left who remember that the last time Yahoo tried to play a prominent role in designing its own content, it didn't end well.

Is Yahoo on a path to becoming the world's biggest content aggregation site? If so, there are obviously far more costs that can be wrung out of its various products: how many people are required to produce OMG!? Does Yahoo Sports need all those writers? Couldn't the company just hire a few people to keep the site filled with content from partners and save a boatload without sacrificing traffic?

Yahoo declined to make anyone available Wednesday to share the company's broad vision beyond its determination to make its exit from the search arena official. Shareholders, who clearly now understand that they'll never see anything close to the $33-a-share offer that Microsoft originally dangled in front of co-founder Jerry Yang, will soon be impatient to see the long-term plan, now that a search deal has been worked out.

Well that's pretty much killed Yahoo hasn't it. Yahoo's portal was the 90's version of social networking, they haven't really got anything solid to fall back on. Selling off YSB and Hotjobs and invested in Xoopit... might be heading in the right direction but think it's too late + I'm not sure even they know what they are now (media company sounds too 90's generic).

Their attempt to get in on the social/mail (Yahoo Life) will soon get blown out of the water with the introduction of Google Wave.

I'm pretty excited to see what becomes of this.

Yahoo search has done nothing for me in terms of traffic in years.
Bing is still pretty new and hasn't really caught on to the mass public yet (at least my referral % tell me this)

I'm more interested to see what may come out of advertising efforts. I've been running adCenter in the beta for a while now. The ads pay VERY well from my experience, but the fill and diversity of the ads just isn't there (I see the same 10 ads every day). Because of this lack of diversity, CTR is also hurt a bit.
Perhaps as a team, they can get some competition for adsense together and help all of us publishers roll in some much needed extra cash.

At least for inbound referral links, I'm not going to miss Yahoo either. For all of my sites Google has been #1 for the past few years with Live ... er, Bing... being #2 and Yahoo no where in sight.

We Can't say any thing about Bing.com now it's still new and After I See some visitors from Bing I Will Make a compare thread between Google,Yahoo and Bing
Until now I Have 890 page indexed in Bing so Bing need some more time with the sites to index it and want some people to use it because 80% of internet users in the world using Google Search Engine

Bing is already my #2 referring search engine. It still trails HIGHLY behind google, but its gaining strength every day. It already gives me 10x the traffic that yahoo does.

I was taking a closer look at Bing, and so far I'm hardly impressed. I use a Mac and Bing offers absolutely nothing in webmaster tools for Mac users... that's a huge thumbs down to me. If Microsoft expects Bing.com to even have a chance at knocking out Google, they will have to climb off their high horse and make the tools on Bing that are Mac friendly as well.

What do you mean by "Bing offers absolutely nothing in webmaster tools for Mac users".

Is it simply non-accessible?

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

Bing is already my #2 referring search engine. It still trails HIGHLY behind google, but its gaining strength every day. It already gives me 10x the traffic that yahoo does.

Yahoo ? I Already Forget yahoo search in my new forum I didn't submit my sitemap to yahoo I Submit only for Google and Bing and Ask
My first search engine and my home page is Google web search
But who knows maybe Bing will be my home page

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

What do you mean by "Bing offers absolutely nothing in webmaster tools for Mac users".

Is it simply non-accessible?

They offer a lot of downloadable tools for webmasters and such, but it's all for windows OS. I can get to everything that everyone else with a internet connection can.

It's a little annoying because I wanted to look at their SEO tools to see what they had, but can't.

Can you be more specific? I've never seen a downloadable tool offered in the webmaster area.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

Can you be more specific? I've never seen a downloadable tool offered in the webmaster area.

Here's the first one, I'll have to find the other one because I don't see it now. All the extensions for it as well since I can't use the toolkit.

Search Engine Optimization Toolkit : The Official Microsoft IIS Site

Oh, on bing. I was looking on Google... I will check those out.

agreed, yahoo was just crap. when i type in the wrong adress of a site Bing pops up, its getting annoying. is Microsoft making it pop up or what? and im even using FF when it happens. i must say Bing looks better than yahoo and my site is actually on the search lol. not like yahoo, a heap of low graded sites a head of mine. see how it goes i guess.

Does anyone have an idea of how to increase the number of indexed pages in bing? I have quite a few websites that are indexed well in Google, but not in bing. I'm talking about 20,000 in the big G vs 120 in bing.