Microsoft and Yahoo cooperate on Search

Bing now to be the search engine for Yahoo. Help!

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Bing, the reincarnation of Live Search, which was the reincarnation of MSN Search is now going to be the search engine in use by Yahoo and this is not a good idea, I would say. Bing or whatever its name was or may be in the future is not ever going to be competition for Google and Yahoo Search was better than MSN ever so, why the merger, I ask.

Will this co-operation/merger between Microsoft and Yahoo be good for the users?

Firstly I would say that this may turn a lot of current Yahoo users off and against the company and secondly I am not sure whether the monopoly commissions somewhere should not take a closer look at this. Mind you, not that that would ever bother Microsoft for they have taken no notice whatsoever so far of what, for instance, the European Union has told it to do.

However, it must also be seriously doubted that those two even combined can ever get anywhere near Google, as search engine or otherwise.

As a search engine MSN Search, in its various guises and incarnations, including its latest reincarnation as “Bing”, has always been rather mediocre and lagging behind Yahoo Search even and can never come anywhere close to Google and compete with it.

Unless something of a miracle happens this merger is going to be a wasted exercise and may lead to users abandoning Yahoo, for example.

There are enough users who have a gripe against Microsoft but still use Yahoo, even though Yahoo uses web beacons, for instance, as homepage, for email and such and this “joint venture” of Yahoo with MSN could very well be the straw that breaks the camel's back and might lead to an exodus of users from Yahoo to elsewhere.

I personally am amongst other a Yahoo user with an email account, yahoo groups and My Yahoo homepage, using the latter also as an aggregation agent for RSS feeds and such. However, due tot he fact that Yahoo email cannot be collected onto email clients anymore I have migrated my business email to Gmail and may, sooner or later, also take my homepage to Google.

While Gmail has a strange interface when it comes to the webmail part it downloads just like any old-fashioned POP3 to most email clients and that is just what many of us need.

Since the merger there seem to be also quite a lot of small annoying hiccups on Yahoo such as on Mail when one tries to delete a message one needs two attempts often. Not very helpful when one is in a hurry to do things.

So, I do not see this merger as a good thing for users and neither for Yahoo.

© 2009
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