Microsoft’s Bing to power Yahoo! search!0

A ten year deal with reciprocal value means that Google now has some almost serious competition to the almost monopolistic grasp it has on the search market in the U.S. and more so in the U.K. Not only will Bing’s platform power Yahoo’s search results, but Microsoft will be able to utilise Yahoo’s search technologies into its web search platform.

Yahoo’s stock fell 12% on the news to $15.14 and Microsoft a small gain of 33 cents to $23.80 sounding the death knell of the Search pioneer, who once owned the original PPC platform technology. There is a revenue deal in place for Yahoo! for the foreseeable future but I wonder if turning down the original deal proposition will be costly, reminding me of former Excite’s CEO George Bell turning down $1M to buy Google! Danny Sullivan commented earlier “There was a time when the mighty Yahoo roared above all other search engines. When people were so worried about being listed in Yahoo that they pondered lawsuits over the issue, because not being in Yahoo was like not being on the internet at all.”

The deal, currently going through Congress in the States will take up to 24 months to complete. What will happen in the meantime? Will Google lose more market share? Will we see a new player enter the market? Will Ask get their act together? Who knows. But for now, Yahoo search is dead in the water and the future of Search is uncertain. For advertisers, having less competition is bad. But if this mounts a challenge to Google’s dominance, then the future is slightly rosier.