Xavier Media®

It looks like Yahoo! and Microsoft finally signed their long-awaited search deal, but is the agreement as good as the companies claim?

From what I understand after reading at TechCrunch.com Yahoo! will do the ad selling using Microsofts ad platform AdCenter and Microsoft will provide their search engine Bing to Yahoos users. This may sound good, but do you remember a short time ago when Yahoo launched their ad system Panama?

Also will the users really prefer to use Bing over Yahoos own search engine? Personally I don't like Bing at all since my experience is that Yahoo is providing much better results. Yahoo is much bigger than both Microsoft and Google in some parts of Asia since Yahoo is providing so much better search results for these regions. If Bing is used instead there's a huge risk that these users will be lost to other search engines like Google.

The best search API there is today is provided by Yahoo (BOSS) which makes it possible for anyone with minimal programming skills to setup their own search engine, and also to sort the results like they want to. For example we use it at XavierSeek.com and for the Xavier search results we've provided a list of sites to show results from (like XavierMedia.com). This and many other features are not available to the average programmer by any other API and if Bing is introduced instead of Yahoos own search engine, then there's a big risk that these search results will be of much less quality…

Now it's just not only me who is a little bit skeptic to this new deal, also the stock market seems to be disliking it. Just have a look at this post at TechCrunch where you can see that the Yahoo stock price dropped a lot directly after the deal had been announced.

What do you think?

About the author
Andreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.