The service gained a lot of popularity and became the single largest free hosting service. In 1999, the beat of internet, Yahoo bought the company and continued the service flawlessly. But the popularity was on gradual decline because of better and more featureful options by other free service providers. But still, alot of users sticked to GeoCities.

During the last one year, Yahoo! has been continous decline. It started with the Microsoft’s interest to acquire the company. Though Yahoo declined the offer in interest of it’s investors and users.
Why is GeoCities shutting Down?
The reason specified on Yahoo’s site is pretty much unfair for the consumers and reverse for the company:

We have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways. Beginning on October 26, 2009, you will no longer be able to use GeoCities to maintain a free presence online — but we’re excited about the other services we have designed to help you connect with friends and family and share your activities and interests.
We recommend our award-winning Web Hosting service, which works a lot like GeoCities but includes a personalized domain name (such as widgetdesigns.com) and matching email, terrific new site building tools, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, premium customer support, and more. See more on moving to Web Hosting.

Clearly, they are no longer encouraging free services. Reason being, they are already having a drowning business and they are cutting costs wherever possible. Primary reasons had been loss of interest and dis-investment- (CEO Bartz brings Trouble to Yahoo! Investors: $2Million Shares Cashed-out)

Whatever is going on inside Yahoo, we have only glimpse of it but what we know for sure is- It’s Not right for the company, not right for the users.  Yahoo’s CEO Bartz said“We Have Never Been a Search Company”. Wow! I remember, I saw it growing from “a Search” to “Everything”.

Hey Yahoo, whatever you are doing, you are getting worse.Your market share is falling, economic state is worse, one of the main Inspiration: Carl Icahn, resigned; I no longer see a hope with left out business : stinky search (bing), outdated Email, IM. I hope you don’t shudown developers API, widgets, webservices, which most developers still use.
I wish… Yahoo had listened to Google.

Yahoo was the first love for several Internet users.

Her credibility has been in question since a while. Investors were amazed when she quoted Yahoo was never a search company.

As per the  Guardian news

According to regulatory filings, Bartz has made two major stock sales in the past nine months – more than $830,000 (£500,000) in March and a further $1.14m in June.

While executives are entitled to sell the options that they had been given, he said that Bartz was sending the wrong message by exercising so many of her stock options so soon after joining the company.

“Two million already cashed out for Bartz is too much, too soon, doesn’t really fit with her ‘I didn’t need this job as I was retired’ image she portrays” says an investor.

She is entitled with a monthly salary of $1m and her max annual bonus goes upto $4m. In return to the company, she ain’t doing anything positive.

Bartz is not the only one in the selling race. Other high-level executives have sold shares including Mike Callahan, Yahoo’s general counsel, selling approximately $1.35 million worth of stock options.

In an internal memo, Bartz said

“We are the largest media property on the internet. So get out of the sugar low – we have work to do. Stop staring at our navels, stop arguing with each other. Stop debate, debate, debate and let’s focus on the competition.”

In its latest financial results, the company said that revenue for the past three months was down 13% from the same period last year to $1.5billion, while profit rose slightly to $141m.

Bartz’s influence appears to have had little impact on the company’s bottom line so far, however, with her biggest achievement being the agreement earlier this summer to hand over control of Yahoo’s search engine business to Microsoft. Though investor’s reacted negatively to that business deal, we are still not sure where Yahoo is heading.

When Microsoft made its deal last month with Yahoo to provide the search infrastructure for its home page, using technology from Bing, it left open and non-exclusive the fate of several deals the one-time #2 search provider had already made, especially with carriers. Specifically, does Bing become the default search provider for services that had previously made a deal with Yahoo? The answer appeared to be no.

Today, that suspicion was roundly confirmed, as one of the world’s largest cooperative portals with Yahoo — one which still bears the Yahoo brand.

In a move first discovered by the UK-based blog Connected Internet, BT’s Web portal BT Yahoo became a carrier of Google search rather than Bing.

Source: Connected Internet

Google and Yahoo tried to agree a deal in 2008 in the US to replace Yahoo sponsored listings with Google’s higher value listings, but the deal ran into Justice Department issues and didn’t complete.  This deal in the UK clearly goes one step further by replacing not only Yahoo’s sponsored results, but the whole Yahoo web search engine i.e natural results, with Google’s. Image and Video results appear to be still coming from Yahoo though.

The non-exclusive nature of the Microsoft deal could mean that a multitude of lucrative deals Yahoo made last year with mobile carriers, including UK-based Virgin Mobile, may leave an opening for something other than Bing search. Yahoo had re-announced its Yahoo Mobile service last February, at the pinnacle of which was the mobile edition of its oneSearch mobile search platform, with voice search features. Google’s mobile search has similar functionality, pointing to the possibility that mobile services as well as PC pages could open unforeseen doors for carriers that haven’t seen any lucrative value in Microsoft’s presence in mobile in recent months, to perhaps move to Google without disturbing the spirit or even the letter of their Yahoo deals. Mobile carrier deals are where the money is.

We were surprised when Bartz, Yahoo’s CEO said  “We Have Never Been a Search Company”. But ray of hope of Innovation at Yahoo! looks to be alive.

After Yahoo signed away its Search infrastructure to Microsoft in an historic deal late last month, which many perceive as Yahoo opening its floodgates to Bing. Yahoo share had dropped over this, but Microsoft is very +ve over the deal. In an effort to minimize the appearance of the deal having any impact on Yahoo’s search strategy, the company’s senior vice president for search, Prabhakar Raghaven, told reporters Yahoo can still innovate with regard to the experience users receive from search. Maintaining the search engine itself, however, was a battle Yahoo could no longer afford to fight.

“The back-end of search is a megawatt war, and that is what we are getting out of. We believe the battle has move beyond the back end; we want to fight the battle on the other end.”

The end that Yahoo is dealing with this week is the one that delivers users the feeling of success. Yesterday, the company demonstrated additions that it’s rolling out to its search pages in the coming days, which will include an enhanced left column alongside its search results. There, users can narrow down results to specific sites, including how-to site eHow, online retailer Amazon, and Wikipedia.

Another innovation being tested can perhaps be called “inclusive context,” for lack of a better phrase being offered by Yahoo itself. The context of successive searches can follow one of the same contexts implied by previous ones, if there are matching contexts. The user does not, in this case, have to put all his search terms into the same search each time. Thus, for example, a search for NFL followed by a successive search for Bears will give higher precedence to the Chicago football team than to the genus ursidae.

Users will be able to drill down through successive contexts by way of a “Related Concepts” bar that appears below the new related sites list. Thus, a search that starts with bears could pull up concept links to the species and the team. Bing has rolled out a similar feature, and has already received some praise for it.

Within last few days, we observed something new. Yahoo! is  now encouraging Firefox users that they’d be better off switching to the “new, safer Internet Explorer 8″.

A Drastic Change?

Last year we saw Yahoo advising IE users to switch to “NEW safer, faster Firefox 3″. No what happened that made them feel that IE is better than Firefox? Is it the new love-affair that Yahoo has been into since this season? Poor Irony, Yahoo!

Here is a screenshot :

“Money drives encouragement” says an analyst. “We are not sure where Yahoo! is heading, but All I know is that it ain’t good”

Yahoo had been a motivator of Open Source. Last year’s failed acquisition was a solid proof to the fact and second was the Fall of Yahoo share value after the deal, this year.

Strangeness in Yahoo’s behaviour doesn’t end here. When Yahoo went into losses, in this Quarter results, CEO Bartz declared  ”Yahoo was never a search company“. As far as I remember, they started being the best alternative to existing search engines like altavista, ask.

After the Bing deal, they lost their roots, and now they are too Microsoft dominated. I guess it’s high-time for Open Source industry to learn from Microsoft-Yahoo deal.

Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo are in talks to sign up to the Open Book Alliance being spearheaded by the Internet Archive. They oppose a legal settlement that could make Google the main source for many online works.

“Google is trying to monopolise the library system,” the Internet Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle told BBC News. “If this deal goes ahead, they’re making a real shot at being ‘the’ library and the only library.”

Back in 2008, the search giant reached an agreement with publishers and authors to settle two lawsuits that charged the company with copyright infringement for the unauthorised scanning of books.

In that settlement, Google agreed to pay $125m (£76m) to create a Book Rights Registry, where authors and publishers could register works and receive compensation. Authors and publishers would get 70% from the sale of these books with Google keeping the remaining 30%.

Google would also be given the right to digitise orphan works. These are works whose rights-holders are unknown, and are believed to make up an estimated 50-70% of books published after 1923.

Comments on the deal have to be lodged by 4 September. In early October, a judge in the Southern district of New York will consider whether or not to approve the class-action suit.

In a separate development, the US Department of Justice is conducting an anti-trust investigation into the impact of the agreement.

Open access

Critics have claimed the settlement will transform the future of the book industry and of public access to the cultural heritage of mankind embodied in books.

The Internet Archive scans around 1000 books a day at 30 cents a page

“The techniques we have built up since the enlightenment of having open access, public support for libraries, lots of different organisational structures, lots of distributed ownership of books that can be exchanged, resold and repackaged in different ways – all of that is being thrown out in this particular approach,” warned Mr Kahle.

The non-profit Internet Archive has long been a vocal opponent of this agreement. It is also in the business of scanning books and has digitised over 1.5 million to date. All are available free.

As the 4 September deadline approaches, the number of groups and organisations voicing their opposition is growing. But with three of the world’s best-known technology companies joining the chorus, the Open Book Alliance can expect to make headlines the world over.

Microsoft and Yahoo have confirmed their participation. However, Amazon has so far declined to comment because the alliance has not yet been formally launched.

“All of us in the coalition are oriented to foster a vision for a more competitive marketplace for books,” said Peter Brantley, the Internet Archive’s director of access. “We feel that if approved, Google would earn a court-sanctioned monopoly and the exploitation of a comprehensive collection of books from the 20th Century.”

Trust

Much of the focus of the proposed settlement has been on anti-trust and anti-competitive concerns, but just as many are worried about privacy.

Privacy is a big concern for critics

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU of Northern California and the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group wrote to Google to ask the company to “assure Americans that Google will maintain the security and freedom that library patrons have long had: to read and learn about anything… without worrying that someone is looking over their shoulder or could retrace their steps”.

“We simply don’t like the settlement in its current form,” said Consumer Watchdog advocate John Simpson.

“There are serious questions about privacy and Google seems to be taking the view ‘let us put this in place and we will do the right thing down the road’. That is simply not good enough.”

The American Libraries Association (ALA) agrees.

“We do think the product in essence is good but the proposed settlement asks us to trust Google and the other parties a little too much,” the ALA’s associate director Corey Williams told BBC News.

“When it comes to privacy, the agreement is silent on the issue and with regard to what Google intends to do with the data it collects. It’s a great idea but it requires more trust than I think we feel comfortable being able to extend at this point,” said Ms Williams.

The Future

In its defence, Google has argued that the deal brings great benefits to authors and will make millions of out-of-print books widely available online and in libraries.

In a statement, the company said: “The Google Books settlement is injecting more competition into the digital books space, so it’s understandable why our competitors might fight hard to prevent more competition.”

The author said she is not surprised by the reaction to the settlment

Despite the increasing tide of criticism over the settlement, there are some who believe there is not that much to fear.

Michelle Richmond is the author of New York Times best seller The Year of Fog, which is also being turned into a movie starring Rachel Weiss.

“The thing I keep hearing from authors is ‘I don’t know what this settlement really means’. But this is the brave new world and we don’t really know where it is going,” Ms Richmond told BBC News

“Most authors work for so little and start from the point of we are doing this for the love it. But when there is this company that has nothing to do with the creation of the book or its publication, I think a lot of authors are concerned about this being a portal to greater access to their work without compensation for writers.”

In an interview with Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s CEO, and she uttered a quote that lead to industry-wide disagreement.

When we think about Yahoo, Google, what do we think first?

Ms. Bartz places Yahoo’s position in a rather different light. “We have never been a search company,” she said. “It is, ‘I am on Yahoo. I am going to do a search.’”

What? Am I wrong or …?

Yahoo, according to Ms. Bartz, simply feeds search results for people who have grown curious while reading one of its news stories or watching a video. It doesn’t generally pop into peoples’ minds as the first place to go look for answers during the course of their day-to-day activities.

As such, Ms. Bartz said she could continue to live with the 20 percent or so share of the search market Yahoo has today. “I am a very viable number,” she said. “It is very profitable, and we would be happy all day long.”

The biggest thing for Yahoo is increasing the number of pages people consume and slapping as many display ads as possible across those pages. “My fortunes are tied to my pages,” Ms. Bartz said.

When it comes to those pages, Yahoo seems to be in a state of confusion. Its Sports section, for example, has reporters producing top-notch original material ranging from scoopy news items and blogs to long-form analysis pieces. The other parts of Yahoo tend to rely far more heavily on stories and other content from outside organizations.

According to Ms. Bartz, the majority of Yahoo’s sites will go the way of Sports. In particular, Yahoo will throw investments behind its entertainment, finance and news operations. Ms. Bartz noted that there are plenty of unemployed journalists out there to pick up.

This is, of course, a delicate dance for Yahoo. The company’s strength has been in collecting information, not producing it. As Yahoo competes more and more with its partners, they may turn their back on Yahoo’s immense page views.

In addition, Ms. Bartz will remember that Terry Semel, a longtime Warner Bros. executive, was brought in before to turn Yahoo into more of a media company. Mr. Semel’s tenure was perhaps characterized more for losing to Google than anything else.

And if Yahoo isn’t a search engine today, it’s not for a lack of trying. The company had invested billions in search technology before the recent deal that made Microsoft’s Bing its search partner.

Founded as “David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” and created by then-Stanford students David Filo and Jerry Yang, the site was quickly renamed Yahoo as an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”

As the Internet grew, so did Yahoo’s database of Web sites, forcing the fledgling company to leave Stanford’s network and partner with Netscape for a time.

Sadly, Yahoo eventually lost its way in the search business and missed becoming either Alta Vista or Google, which sequentially replaced Yahoo as the hot place to find new places to visit online. Google still has that role.

Yahoo instead became a portal, competing with AOL in a business that has been made increasingly irrelevant by the rise of, you guessed it, the search engine. Yahoo used to help people find content. Now, Yahoo repackages other people’s content as well as creating some of its own. As a portal, Yahoo isn’t an especially good one, as I’ve said, “Yahoo is over.”

Ms. Bartz has decided to correct past mistakes by getting all of the employees on the same page and presenting a more consistent look across Yahoo’s sites. In addition, she’s trying to boost morale and get the energy of the company up again –- a task hurt by the hit Yahoo’s shares took after the Microsoft deal was announced.

“I felt bad for the employees because they think it’s a report card,” Ms. Bartz said.

That said, Ms. Bartz seems to have made quite the impression on at least one of her employees.

Yahoo should have become Google, except the portal business looked more attractive at the time.

“Nobody gets it,” he said about the deal, unveiled Wednesday after more than a year in the making.

Under terms of the 10-year deal, Microsoft’s Bing search engine and adCenter platform will power Yahoo’s search-based advertising business, while Yahoo’s sales team will handle both companies’ premium search customers.

Ballmer attempted to explain why the deal will benefit both companies and to perhaps repair some of the damage to Yahoo’s stock price.

While Microsoft’s stock went up after the deal was announced, which seems like a Good news for Microosft, Yahoo’s dipped. As of now, Friday morning, it is trading at US$14.64, down 15 percent from where it was before the deal and half the price Microsoft originally offered to pay for each share of Yahoo when it made its $44.6 billion unsolicited bid last February.

Wall Street had expected Yahoo to come away from the deal with a sizeable cash payment from Microsoft up front for its search assets, but that wasn’t the case, which largely explains why investors reacted negatively.

Ballmer acknowledged that since there was no exchange of money in the deal, investors and analysts are clearly puzzled.

“Economics is where people get even more confused,” he said. “What happened? Nothing got bought. Nothing got sold.”

Still, Ballmer said he’s not sure why Wall Street would be sour on a deal in which Yahoo will generate about $500 million in operating income and a savings of about $200 million in capital expenditures once it closes. “That’s one that stuns me,” he said.

For Yahoo, the big boon of the deal is it’s taking significant operating and R&D costs out of its business while retaining 88 percent of the search revenue it is already getting, because Microsoft will pay Yahoo traffic acquisition costs at an initial rate of 88 percent during the first five years of the agreement, Ballmer said.

Both companies will get scale out of the deal, allowing them to reach a larger network of advertisers and users. This will lead to improvement of the search product, but not financial improvement as far as revenue growth right away, he said.

“The more queries you can see, the more you can tune your product, The more advertisers advertise on your system and the more relevant they make their ads for your users. The advertising is part of the actual user experience.”

Even as he defended the deal, Ballmer on Thursday seemed conscious of the fact that Microsoft blundered in search by not investing early enough, and suggested that the company has learned a lesson from the long time it took to close the Yahoo deal — time in which Google continued to grow its already sizeable market share in search.

“In our business in this industry, probably the greatest source of economic value creation is choosing to be in the right businesses early enough, When you don’t choose to be in early enough you have a problem. When you choose to stay out of a business that is economic value creation, you won’t grow with the market. If you are picking the right things that’s a very important call.”

He is certainly not happy. But is market mis-interpreting or do they understand something better than Yahoo and Microsoft?

FACT:

It’s not a merger. Yahoo’s open source projects remain Yahoo’s, though their opensource driven search goes offline for long decade Hibernation. This is totally opposite to the Oracle-Sun deal, where Sun’s open source projects were said to be behind Oracle’s interest.

But, Yahoo isn’t all strong on the other sides. Yahoo’s open source projects are now held by a company that is cash poor. The company will be under enormous pressure to monetize its software assets, and the for-sale sign is already out.

Within this year, we have seen Platinum companies taking the opportunity and buying-off Open source companies –  Sun – solaris, Java – Open Office. The Yahoo User Interface Library. All just pawns in bigger corporate games.

This may be hard for backers of the corporate open source model, But when you support a corporate open source program, your community efforts are subject to the corporation’s strategic whims. Living at someone else’s mercy.

The Story & Analogy:

It won’t be incorrect to relate the corporate Open source world to this story – open source analogy, Tom Sawyer “painting” his Aunt Polly’s fence. Who winds up painting the fence? Who gets the credit? Twain meant the tale as a satire of Gilded Age capitalism, the eternal struggle where you knead and bake the bread but I eat it.

Contrast this with corporate community projects such as Eclipse or Apache. What happens with one contributor there has only a limited impact on the community as a whole. Not only does the code abide, but so does the governing structure. That’s protection which goes beyond what you’ll find in a mere software license.

This lesson may prove hard to swallow. Communities can be unwillingly starved, but corporate projects can ignore community members’ wills. Those who don’t like the terms can fork it, out in the cold cruel world, or they can suck it up.

What Microsoft is saying to open source here, what Oracle said to open source in the Sun deal, was said perhaps most famously by Tom Friedman in regards to the Iraq war.

The polite paraphrase of Friedman’s statement is this — You don’t count.

Since then, we have seen a bunch of news about Micro-hoo! deals. With no final news coming out, it was getting fishy. But today, the deal was finally announced: Microsoft and Yahoo! have finally Married under a Deal - strictly limited to internet search and advertising.

This move, as per the companies, is supposed to help both in their competition with Google. The deal covers a whole chunk of things, but the most important one is that Bing will become the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! web sites. OMG!

In addition, Yahoo! will be the “exclusive worldwide relationship sales force” for the companies’ premium search advertisers. Microsoft’s AdCenter will take care of self-serve advertising.

Also of note is that Microsoft will gain an exclusive 10 year license to all of Yahoo!’s search technologies, and they will be allowed to integrate said technologies into Microsoft search platforms. The deal will last for 10 years, and has been in the works for over 2 years.

Yahoo said:

“This agreement comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo!, our users, and the industry. And I believe it establishes the foundation for a new era of Internet innovation and development,” said Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, “Users will continue to experience search as a vital part of their Yahoo! experiences and will enjoy increased innovation thanks to the scale and resources this deal provides. Advertisers will also benefit from scale and enjoy greater ease of use and efficiencies working with a single platform and sales team for premium advertisers.”

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is excited:

“Through this agreement with Yahoo!, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers, and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company, Success in search requires both innovation and scale. With our new Bing search platform, we’ve created breakthrough innovation and features. This agreement with Yahoo! will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness. Microsoft and Yahoo! know there’s so much more that search could be. This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search. With the deal signed and ink drying, you may be wondering about the details behind the historic Microsoft and Yahoo search agreement, which may finally begin to put some pressure on Google’s dominance in search. We break it down for you.”

Here is the summary of what this deal really means as per betanews:

Fundamentals:

• Yahoo will use Microsoft’s Bing for it’s search.
• Yahoo will take over premium search advertising on both Yahoo! Search and Bing.
• Self-serve advertisers will use Microsoft’s AdCenter system on both sites.
• The agreement duration is 10 years
• The deal will still need regulatory approval, which Microsoft and Yahoo hope to have by early 2010.
• Even though it will use Bing under the hood, Yahoo will have full control as to how its search looks and operates. (UI is yahoo, back-end is bing)
• The agreement does not cover each company’s web properties and products, email, instant messaging, display advertising, or any other aspect of the companies’ businesses.

The Details

• Yahoo is giving Microsoft a 10 year license to its search technologies, which the Redmond company may integrate into Bing or other sites.
• The deal does not cover standard display advertising on other Microsoft and Yahoo sites, only search ads.
• The transition to Bing will start in the US and take between 3 and 6 months. Yahoo moving from its own Panama ad system to AdCenter will take 12 months.
• Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says he expects 2 years of transition costs and a few hundred million dollars in expenses.
• Some Yahoo engineers may become Microsoft employees.
• Microsoft and Yahoo expect Google to fight the deal, but feel the company has little ground to stand on since it controls so much of the market.
• Some Yahoo employees will lose their jobs, but Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz had no numbers to share.
• Advertisers buying through AdCenter will have no control whether their ad appears on Bing or Yahoo! Search. The companies will be strictly selling a combined market.
• Yahoo will have the flexibility to integrate Bing into its other properties, such as Yahoo! News.

The Money

• Microsoft is not paying anything up front for Yahoo to adopt Bing and AdCenter, something investors are not too happy about.
• Microsoft will pay Yahoo 88% traffic acquisition costs (or TAC) at an initial rate of 88% of search revenue. This rate will last for 5 years.
• Yahoo expects the deal to add up to $500 million in operating revenue annually and save the company $200 million.
• Cash flow to Yahoo is expected to go up $275 million per year when the transition is complete.
• The deal being discussed last year with the up-front payment was more invest oriented Bartz and Ballmer said.
• Yahoo will continue expanding its search affiliate partnerships.
• Microsoft will guarantee Yahoo revenue per search (RPS) in each country for the first 18 months following initial implementation in that country.

Why the deal was done

• With both Microsoft and Yahoo sites driving Bing, the algorithms will improve and the results get even better. This is much better than if each site operated independently.
• Google controls around 78% of paid search.
• Advertisers will benefit from scale and working with a single platform (AdCenter) and sales team for premium advertisers (Yahoo).
• Even with Microsoft controlling the search results, Yahoo feels it can still be innovative. For example, it can put information and links to Yahoo services above the results.
• Yahoo didn’t want a bunch of cash up front, it wanted a sustained revenue source moving forward.

As per Betanews post:

Today, the first broader-based data analysis from ratings service comScore closely confirms what the early samples were saying: During the month of June, Microsoft-hosted searches including Bing for US customers numbered just 30 million more than for Microsoft-hosted searches including Windows Live the month before. This is during a month when just over 14 billion general searches were processed by the nation’s top five providers.

The news looks a little better for Microsoft when you consider that June was a slow month for searches overall — down by 2%. So while Google’s general search traffic declined by 2% in keeping with the general trend, its US usage share overall stayed flat at 65%. Bing gained 0.4% of usage share over Windows Live last June — better than flat, but not the “Bing Boom” that some made it out to be.

Today, the latest sampling data from NetApplications shows Bing processing an estimated 5.31% of worldwide queries, although Live Search is curiously still showing up in the statistics with an extra two thirds of one percent.

Let’s not blindly follow the stats. Consider the fact that LIVE & MSN search were having 10% Search market share and now Bing has only 5.3%. What happened to rest of it? Did Microsoft lose it?

Another fact worth considering is, IE is still the most popular browser that covers atleast 60% of interent users and IE has default search engine set to “Bing“. Why then the rest 54.7% didn’t opt for Bing and tried possibly a different search engine? Though Microsoft tried to monoplize the search by defaulting it to Bing, still we don’t see a significant number that can convince that Bing is a success. This has resulted in nothing but alot of frustrated users.

Microsoft fears this secretly that at this pace, they will never be able to catchup Google. Today, new Reportsarrive about Microsoft-Yahoo deal again being re-opened.

As per NetworkWorld:

In less than a week, Microsoft could reach an alliance with Yahoo that could compete better with Google in online search advertising, according to media reports.

The latest deal would call for Microsoft paying Yahoo several billion dollars for its search advertising business, with Yahoo also receiving ongoing payments, according to All Things Digital, a blog owned by the Wall Street Journal.

Yahoo’s  CEO Carol Bartz asserted that the company would “be better off if we had never heard the word Microsoft.”

Its matter of question that what If Microsoft took over Yahoo’s online advertising business, whether the companies could collectively save money while aggregating their market shares. Yahoo has particular expertise in mobile and display advertising. However, many analysts questioned how quickly Microsoft would be able to integrate Yahoo into its operations and if the resulting entity would be a nimble competitor against Google.

All this literally shows how Insecure is Microsoft feeling w.r.t the competition with Google. May be it’s the right time they should learn “How to Innovate” rather than fighting over ruthless competition.

News of Bing eating Google and Yahoo search share rules out to be a miss-calculation. Three out of four major market research firms say that Yahoo still leads significantly in traffic. (Source: DailyTech)

Microsoft’s new product seized the number two search spot says one research report, others disagree

The Yahoo Microsoft saga is an irresistible one for the tech news community, both for journalists and readers alike.  After Yahoo disregarded Microsoft’s 2008 purchase offer, Microsoft decided to go its own way, cooking up Kudo.  So when the newly renamed Kudo, now Bing, was released last week and appeared to seize second place in searches from Yahoo, some quickly reported Microsoft to be victorious over Yahoo.  Now it appears, those reports may have been misleading.

If there has been one consistent thing about Bing and its reception, it has been the lack of consistency.  Some have showered praise on the search engine, arguing that while not a leap and bound over Google, it provides a much better experience than the old Live search and better options to refine your search.

Other reviewers were less positive, including a particularly scathing review by PC World which accused Microsoft of “binging” customers.  It claimed Microsoft’s Cashback discounted “best price” items which appeared as search results were actually substantially more expensive than offerings from discount retailers like Amazon.com and Newegg.com.

Then came a StatCounter report at the end of last week, which claimed Bing scored 16.28 percent of U.S. search traffic last week compared to 10.22 percent by Yahoo and 71.47 by Google.  The report put Bing’s worldwide total at 5.62 percent, compared to 5.13 by Yahoo and 87.62 by Google.  Some blog sites like TechCrunch began to hail Bing as having stolen marketshare from Google and using to bing Yahoo, sprinting into second.

However, the weekend brought still other reports contradicting these figures.  Search Engine Land checked with leading market research firms Comscore, Nielsen, and Hitwise, which reported that Yahoo was consistently doing three times the traffic as Bing.  CNET, which owns a large network of sites also disputed not pass Yahoo. the claims of a Bing victory, saying its own internal data indicated Bing did

The dramatic reversal brings to question the accuracy of the original StatCounter report.  StatCounter’s materials state that its numbers are “based on aggregate data collected by Statcounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion page views per month collected from across the Statcounter network of more than 3 million Web sites. Stats are updated and made available every 4 hours, however are subject to quality assurance testing and revision for 7 days from publication.”

So perhaps poor quality testing let some bad numbers slip through.  What does this mean for Bing?  Likely not much; the search engine is unlikely to post any dramatic gains or losses so soon.  It may get a boost these first few weeks and then see a drop off, much like Google-descendant Cuil.  However, don’t expect it to nosedive like Cuil, either — after all, it has the backing of one of the tech industry’s strongest players.  Ultimately, whether Bing will beat Yahoo likely won’t be decided for months, while a challenge to Google would take years.

source: DailyTech