Yeah, the deal is approved by both European and US regulators as a latest news says in the BBC website. The European Commission ruled that the deal “would not significantly impede effective competition” as together Yahoo and Microsoft control less than 10% of search market compared to 90% by Google in Europe and so it will rather help to increase competition in search engine market by making Microsoft a stronger competitor to Google. The deal also got the approval of the Department of Justice in the United States.
Microsoft and Yahoo have announced that they would start implementing the deal “in the coming days”. The boll is surely rolling.
It was proposed that Microsoft & Yahoo would finalize negotiating the search deal by 27th October. But Yahoo has filed a document in SEC saying that the two parties have failed to close the deal before intended deadline as still some transaction details remain to work out. But they also stated that both the parties are working hard & a lot of progress have been made. This is exactly what they have said:
On October 28, 2009, Yahoo! Inc., a Delaware corporation (“Yahoo!”), and Microsoft Corporation, a Washington corporation (“Microsoft”), mutually agreed to extend the period to negotiate and execute a Search and Advertising Services and Sales Agreement and a License Agreement (the “Definitive Agreements”) reflecting and supplementing the provisions of such agreements as set forth in annexes to their binding letter agreement dated July 29, 2009 (the “Letter Agreement”). The Letter Agreement specified that the parties would execute Definitive Agreements by October 27, 2009, but given the complex nature of the transaction, there remain some details to be finalized. The parties are working diligently on finalizing the agreements, have made good progress to date, and have agreed to execute the agreements as expeditiously as possible. The Letter Agreement was the subject of a Current Report on Form 8-K filed by Yahoo! on August 4, 2009.
And Nathania Johnson from Search Engine Watch contacted Microsoft. They replied that the deal might be implemented by early 2010 hopefully.
This big deal may got delayed. But more importantly it is still on course.
So, it’s done! Microsoft & Yahoo have come to a deal on online search & advertising. In a nutshell, Yahoo Search will now be powered by Bing. And in return, Yahoo will handle the sales & customer support for online advertising.
Here is the official news from BBC. Today I was browsing through the news of the probable deal, and was waiting for the official news to be published. So from webmaster’s perspective, you can now concentrate on two search engines. Time has come to stop worrying about Yahoo search. Perhaps I won’t use Yahoo Site Explorer again, just use Bing’s webmaster tools 
And this deal will make Bing’s challenge to Google search more realistic. Now Bing will have about 30% of search market in USA, while Google retains its share to about 65%.
Some quick notes on the deal:
- Yahoo will get 88% of the search ad sales from its site for the first 5 years & will also have the rights to sell ads on some Microsoft sites.
- Yahoo has said that the deal would boost their annual operating income by $500m & secure $200m as savings.
But forget about everything. It would take some time to finalize & surely go to through tough antitrust scrutiny. But if it happens Yahoo search is going to be eventually a history. I don’t know how to react! We were listening to all these news about the deal for such a long time, but still it is somewhat bizzare to think Yahoo without its own search!
Do you have a new site that is not yet indexed by Bing? Then to submit it manually, you can use newly launched Bing Toolbox. There are two applications mentioned there that can help webmasters:
- To submit a website for Bing search engine inclusion, go to http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx
- And if you want to submit an XML-based sitemap for your site, just enter the below URL in your browser address bar:
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml
Don’t forget to change YourWebAddress.com with your own domain name
By the way, I would recommend you to enlist & verify your sites in Bing Webmaster Tools. You can get all the data about incoming links, outgoing links & even crawl errors that Bing may have encountered while indexing your site. Moreover, you can get Domain score & Page Score to see how your site ranks in Bing. If you had already registered your sites with previous Live Search Webmaster Tools, then your sites are already listed. You don’t have to worry if you haven’t used the new face. Just go to the new url & find everything the same.
