Microsoft meets with private equity over Yahoo deal | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft meets with private equity over Yahoo deal

reuters.com

87 pointssurement61 comments

This looks like another Informatica deal [0]. It actually makes a ton of sense. Yahoo needs to get out of the scrutiny of the public markets and into a private ownership that wants long term results (EBITDA growth year over year) and less trendy bets that try to raise the status of the company (i.e. Tumblr).

[0] - http://www.computerworld.com/article/2960729/enterprise-appl...

That doesn't mean Microsoft needs to get involved. Generally speaking, entities that provide debt financing for private equity investments are the biggest suckers in the investment community.

Article says one of reasons for Microsoft's interest is to preserve search and ad deals with Yahoo

> Article says one of reasons for Microsoft's interest is to preserve search and ad deals with Yahoo

Note that preservation of the search deal might not be in Yahoo's best interest, so depending on where you stand, Microsoft doesn't "need" to be involved in this.

Just out of interest, anyone know why the dateline on that article would be Healdsburg?

> Healdsburg, CALIFORNIA (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) executives are in early talks with potential Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O) investors...

Great little town on the fringe of wine country, why not?

Oh the Irony! I bet they wish they took the 45 billion 8 years ago.

In their defense, their Alibaba stake is actually still quite formidable. But the bid back then was for Yahoo's core businesses...

The funny thing is that Yahoo's alibaba stake + cash on hand is worth something like 40 billion, but yahoo's current market cap is ~35 billion. AKA, Yahoo's core business is worth negative 5 billion dollars.

You are ignoring taxes. Getting 35 billion dollars from selling Alibaba shares into the hands of there stockholders is not simple.

I'm sure they will find a way to pipe the deal through Ireland and offshore that profit

It's the Alibaba stake and cash that are being discounted, as assets typically are on a public balance sheet.

AOL was worth $4.4 billion to Verizon, and was worth several billion publicly traded. Yahoo's operating business is blatantly worth more.

Simple test: show me one example in the last several decades, of a publicly traded company that was sporting a positive balance sheet, with billions in revenue, that traded with a negative market cap. You won't find a single example. It's also the same reason Yahoo didn't trade for a negative valuation prior to Alibaba becoming highly valuable: Yahoo's core business is actually worth something.

The reason why the core business has a negative value is that investors are afraid that Marissa is going to use the money from an Alibaba sale to fund an unprofitable, failed turnaround.

Then why don't you try and buy Yahoo core for a cent .

Microsoft and others don't seem to know what they are doing.

Meyers and management isn't going to let anyone do that if they can help it. Just like how last time the management didn't let anyone do it.

Management != the shareholders. Just because the right thing for shareholders is to sell yahoo doesn't mean that management will go along with it.

THAT is why the core business is worth negative 5 billion dollars. Because management will do everything to drive the company into the ground in order to prevent themselves from loosing control.

I still believe that Steve Ballmer is the only man who can rescue Yahoo.

Can someone explain to me why Facebook isn't buying Yahoo? Perfect Fit.

In what regard? FB has been know to buy hot start-ups that might threaten their business (e.g. Instagram, WhatsApp). Yahoo is a boring old dinosaur whose core business is failing. The only thing worth anything is their stake in Alibaba. The sole thing they own that might interest FB is Tumblr. But Yahoo recently disclosed that they may write down all of the remaining value of that service, which would be $1.1B down the drain.

I'd be curious what Yahoo Finance is worth - I don't know any other finance site as dominate - but again probably not a good match for FB

They are both portals. Facebook social portal. Yahoo personal portal. Go to FB to check friends and discuss things with those you know. Go to Yahoo to check emails, and news and discuss with those you do not know. Facebook is your world. Yahoo is the world at large.

That's like saying Tesla should buy a couple small auto makers - you know, because they both make cars and it'd be a perfect fit.

I had to use Bing and Yahoo search APIs because Google won't let me programmatically use Google search. They are awful and combining them won't help.

Yahoo Search is already powered by Bing – since 2009.[1]

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8174763.stm

which proves the anecdote comment above is probably BS

That's a little much. They do offer a Search API [1] (well, until Friday). Just not terribly surprising it wasn't any better than Bing (since it is Bing).

[1] https://developer.yahoo.com/boss/search/

Indeed. BOSS was available until recently; the XML API for search is available as a replacement.

DuckDuckGo is a proxy for Bing searches. However, DuckDuckGo uses Yahoo BOSS Search API for images, SoundCloud Search API for audio, and YouTube Search API for video.

At first I tried scraping DuckDuckGo but couldn't because my IP was being recorded at some point where it was being throttled. So I looked a little deeper and found the sources of their search data. So I use the services listed above directly.

lol I didn't realize that the Yahoo image search was powered by Bing. The web based search for images return the same, however, the APIs are returning different image sets. The Yahoo version is better.

Lol, good luck shoring up Bing.

I'm sorry but Bing has no real value proposition vs. Google or even Yandex. :/

I disagree, I use Bing on regular basis (also their rewards which I use to donate to local school helps). The results are comparable with Google, and are not that far off by any standards. Its the habit of Googling rather than Objective result set, that is impediment to Bing adoption. Now that Cortana is on Windows 10, lets see.

> The results are comparable with Google, and are not that far off by any standards.

What is the value proposition that differentiates them from Google?

Its a strange question, as a consumer, I enjoy choice of Search Engines and hopefully there will be more than two. I may be minority, but my Bing search results feel much much closer to what I am looking for than Google. It could be my own bias or the simple fact that there is too much SEO gaming targeted to Google compared to Bing.

Fair enough but honestly, I pretty much find this true:

* Google

* DuckDuckGo [ Although with the Ad changes, if I don't have an Ad Blocker enabled, this tends to beat Google. As such, it tends to my default since I use JS blocking. ]

* Yandex / Bing

I think DuckDuckGo gets it's results largely from Bing.

I predominantly see the Yandex symbol and Yandex is cheaper than Bing so I'm not sure that is true.

There are actually a number of factors that go into which you might trigger the most, our primary source is Yahoo! but we also pull from Bing and Yandex in certain regions, as well as information from 400 other sources including Wikipedia, and our own crawler. You can read more about the sources here: https://duck.co/help/results/sources

We try and provide the best results for a query in a region/language regardless of the price. The only caveat is that we will only pull from sources that allow us to continue our privacy commitment to users.

The rewards are one. Granted, they're not huge (I also use Bing and find it amounts to about 1 $5 Amazon gift card per month), but if you find the result quality indistinguishable, it's enough. Also, like sremani, I want to drive innovation in the area of search, and while lots of people pay lip service to wanting more competition, putting your money where your mouth is by not using Google is the only real way to do that.

True, I really do like the rewards. But I really think Bing would get rid of them if it would was a good financial decision. And I think it would be a decent decision if Bing was doing better.

I'm sure that Microsoft has a great deal of data telling them that the Rewards program has a positive ROI, especially because a lot of the rewards are sweepstakes which essentially cost them nothing. Also, I have watched other people use Bing and seen four-digit numbers in their rewards count on the top-right. (It's agonizing, like watching someone who doesn't know about tab-completion use the command line.) This tells me that the number of people who use the Rewards is quite small and this contributes to its usefulness.

Fair enough, I can see people being motivated by $60/year if they find the results comparable.

I have the opposite experience. When searching in Bing I almost always feel "no way that what I'm looking is there somewhere", even for something as simple as a programming language query.

I've had the exact opposite experience. Admittedly it's not a completely fair fight (Google has years of data to tailor results to me, and I know on some level what sort of queries work from experience), but it's common that if I use Bing (it is the default on my Windows Phone) the thing I'm looking for won't be on the first page of results. Using the exact same query on Google almost always has it in the top 3 results.

It's not useless by any stretch, but when (very roughly speaking) a quarter of my searches end up with me going to Google anyway, there isn't much value in trying Bing first.

Bing is pretty good for the casual searchers. Bing's design is also much more mature than that of Google's (for ex', my wife loves Bing images and looks forward to seeing what's new on each day).

remember when you searched for a technical term on Yahoo in the early days, found nothing, then searched on Google and it finally understood what you meant by "c++"?

the same now happens. i search Google, get lots of high profile sites. then search Bing and finally got that one forum thread that helps me with some obscure programming issue that haven't showed up on stack overflow yet.

I end up doing site:stackoverflow.com or site:quora.com for most of my searches

I recently tried a search on Bing after failing to find what I wanted on Google, and it worked! Was really pleasantly surprised. Will be trying out Bing more often going forward.

Bing and Bing-powered search has like 30% share in the US.

Siri is powered by Bing.

15.67%

https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=PGz5VqD0GJGAoAPIrLjABA&...

I often wonder why people are more interested in replying than in reading.

Guessing TheLogothete is using MS touted number which is 'search powered by bing', includes Yahoo (~23% WW and US only >30%) https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=PGz5VqD0GJGAoAPIrLjABA&...

Yahoo uses Bing because Microsoft was willing to cut Yahoo a better deal than Google, which happened because Microsoft was more desperate than Google. That's not exactly a good thing and it's not really a meaningful number.

It would be different if Yahoo users used Yahoo because Yahoo uses Bing, but that's not the case. For example, Bing gets used in some searches because they cut Yahoo a good deal, and Yahoo pays Firefox to be the default search provider. That has nothing to do with Bing's search quality.

If the quality was actually that stark of a difference, they wouldn't have paid for a sub-par search engine - the cost of a search engine is too large of a cost to find marginal savings.

Another factor was that the DOJ had suggested to Yahoo and Google that it would investigate if Yahoo outsourced search / ads to Google.

Its actually a bit above 20% (excluding Yahoo).

http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/15/comscore-bing-steals-from-...

http://searchengineland.com/google-controls-65-percent-of-se...

And 30%+ with Yahoo.

IIRC Yahoo search is already a frontend for Bing. Acquiring Yahoo wouldn't change that.

You would be surprised. Aside from the push it is getting from Windows 10, according to Microsoft filings Bing is now profitable. That is pretty huge, and while Google has had eroding CPC numbers, Microsoft's have been improving. It was just a matter of time before that would pay off for Microsoft.

Given the nature of the search market (there is only one other company in this case) what that means is that all of that profit came at the expense of Google. It gives additional insight into how focused Google has become on fiscal discipline.

[1] "Microsoft announced that Bing had finally achieved profitability. Search contributed more than $1 billion to Microsoft’s first quarter for fiscal 2016, said Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood during the company’s October 22 earnings call." -- http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/22/bing-is-profitable/

That's wrong on two points:

- Microsoft is still the bad boy it has always been, it still owns unfairly 95% of pcs worldwide. There is no reason to be forgiving with this behemoth.

- Bing being profitable or not is completely irrelevant to us end users. What is important is that Bing results are poor to very poor compared to Google's. I know it well because I'm often forced to use it. I wouldn't touch Windows 10 with a pole, but hearing it's poor users are forced to Bing shows clearly enough that Microsoft didn't learn the lesson and is still considering their user as a flock of sheep.

Personally, I don't find bing results "very poor". It does the job for well over 90% of my searches, and on the remaining 10%, Google doesn't do a much better job very often.

I like the UI, I like the rewards system, and the video/image search is actually better than Google for me. Just throwing out an alternative datapoint.

AFAIR in blind tests people found bing results on par with Google. Empirically, I think for the English web it works OK, but for non-english it sucks compared to google.

1) That isn't a statement of a value proposition. So far, really the only things people brought up are rewards & better results [which is largely subjective as you are paying for both of these things].

2) Windows is using shady tactics to push Windows 10. They are doing this due to using it as a conduit to increase Bing results [among other reasons]. They've been smacked for similar tactics before for reasonable sums. [1] [2]

3) The reason Google and later other parties funded Firefox is because the default search engine on a browser is a relatively sticky proposition as many people don't change it.

4) Desktop is more profitable than mobile which is why Google's CPC numbers are eroding. [3]

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/22/bing-is-profitable/ > However, while all that is nice, it’s the second bullet point that matters more than the first. Microsoft derived one out of every five dollars it made in search from Windows 10 devices. Windows 10 has a far smaller footprint than the larger Windows world, due in no small part to its relative age.

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01... > The court fined Microsoft more than $600 million and ordered it to offer a version of Windows in Europe without the Media Player software and to share communications code with rivals.

[3] http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/google-mobile-cpc/11032011/ > We found that mobile CPCs are a median 41% lower than desktop CPCs for the same term with the same bid, copy, matchtype, network targeting and landing page. These results were quite consistent across a sample of clients with the standard deviation at 5%.

Google drives search through Android in much the same way, and there are more android phones out there than windows PCs iirc. I think the "shady tactics" is a moot point.

DDG proxies Bing for most of its searches. I've been relying on it for several years now. Results for recent (past 5 years) Web material are excellent. Some older archival materials not quite so much.

That's exclusive of other DDG features which I like but aren't Bing related.

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