The pictures speak for themselves: Yahoo has gone and made its search results page look a lot like that of Bing’s. Sure, search.yahoo.com is still that unintimidating search bar, but the results page is all shifted around.
Yeah, Yahoo Search Is Done
I’ve seen some opinions online today that this is bad for Yahoo Search, and that Bing is a bigger threat to Yahoo than to Google. Well, yeah. That’s exactly what Bing is.
I hate to break it (though I’m pretty sure I’m not), but the Yahoo-Microsoft search deal essentially all but kills Yahoo as a player in the search game. Sure, some users might still go to Yahoo to make searches, but based on the redesign, Microsoft and Yahoo both expect this to change. When Yahoo signed that contract to route all of its search through Bing, it basically signed a death warrant for it as a player in the search game. But that is probably a good thing for Yahoo in the long run. After all, Yahoo was only losing market share. Not only that, but the company was strapped for cash. So while internet search is a valuable field to be in, it made more financial sense for Yahoo to cash its chips and get out. Yahoo Search was never going to challenge Google, and Bing was at the time and continues to pick up market share.
This is a business lesson for everyone: no matter how valuable a market is, if you don’t understand it, you should get the hell out. Yahoo realized that it didn’t get search. So it made a lot of money selling its brand name to Microsoft. And say what you want about Bing, but don’t call it a failed idea. So not only does Yahoo get to stop sinking cash into a sector of its business that it shouldn’t be in, but it gets paid a lot of money for doing so. That’s a smart thing to do.
