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Why would they go with that deal. How did anyone at Yahoo read that and said "Great, let's do this".

Was it desperation - "If only we could put yahoo search in front of all those firefox users, yahoo will prosper again". Sadly I do imagine someone saying that. People who would disagree probably jumped ship a long time ago.

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Pretty much a standard clause. Put it in your supplier contracts! You want to protect your product from degrading by changes in your supply-chain.

Bankruptcy or a new owner of your supplier may change their product so significantly that you want an immediate out without having to keep your side of the obligations. The supplier just restates with that clause that they won't change the product drastically and what that product is exactly is specified in the rest of the contract.

It was a reasonable proposition, look at all the users funneled by IE and Edge to Bing. Google isn't a be all end all search engine, outside the English language sphere, Yandex, Baidu (albeit propped up by China) and others either dominate or take a large chunk of the search market.

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