Yahoo will serve Bing results

One of the bigger aspects of this deal is that it makes it much harder for yahoo to be acquired by parties other than microsoft.

Essentially microsoft gets two things out of this deal, they get to keep their cash while getting the same effect for free and a big boost for bing.

Yahoo gets to control their cost a bit better.

IMO Yahoo was never a search company anyway. It was a directory of sites and is better positioned like the article says as a media company. It tried to buy it's way into the search technology market (overture, altavista, inktomi, et al) but they didn't know how to manage and integrate the disparate technologies into one holistic search experience. Yahoo is terrible at managing search technology. Period.

It is about time Yahoo stopped pretending to be a search company. Concentrate on growing and monetizing the new media properties they have and they could be very successful. In fact it's the only sane play at this point.

I wonder what will happen to Yahoo's webmaster tools (especially Site Explorer). Those are a good deal better than Bing's...

What happens to BOSS?

I hope they won't mess with the API.... I use that for langpop.com and some other things, and have found it quite pleasant to use.

smart move for yahoo

sooner or later bing would overtake it, given its superior quality and msft's deep pockets. by selling new, bartz gets to bargain while ysearch is still worth something. two years from now after bing had eclipsed ysearch organically, she would have had little to bargain with

search was bound to become a two-horse race...the capital needed to compete is enormous, and it has been clear that yahoo won't be able to go the distance

expect 3k layoffs or more...besides the payouts from msft, the headcount reduction will be a major gain on the balance sheet for bartz

bartz will have to actually stop selling off and closing bits of yahoo and actually try growing something. that challenge still awaits her

Wow, must be a real kick in the nuts for the Live Search people, to go from "Google killar?!" to "replaced by Google's old pretend-rival".