Once the world-wide search leader, Yahoo has continued to shed market share. Yahoo fell to 17.5% from 18% in October according to a monthly comScore report. This is the lowest ever record share for Yahoo in the companies history. Over the past few months, Microsoft’s Bing has slowly gained ground to move over 10% to 10.3% in November.
With the continued dominance and innovation of Google, it begs the question if Yahoo is still a relevant search destination. In the coming months, Yahoo is about to enter into a search deal with Microsoft that will give the two nearly 30% of the market. Under this agreement, Yahoo’s search results, which over the past year have become quite poor, will be powered by Bing.
No doubt utilizing Bing will bring better overall results to Yahoo searchers over the next 10 years which is the length of the deal. During the deal, Microsoft will pay Yahoo 88% of the revenue it gains from searches on Yahoo. It is certainly too early to tell what will come of this partnership, but one thing is for certain that Google currently has the best search technology and shows no sign of letting off their culture of continued innovation.
I think Yahoo search has been on the downturn for quite some time now and this partnership with Bing is simply a last ditch effort before it is totally a lost cause. Google’s ability to innovate and give more consistent relevant results will only give them a further gap in SE usage by consumers. Bing is an interesting concept as a decision engine but only time will tell.