Bing and Yahoo! have agreed a deal which will essentially kill off the Yahoo! search engine and merge its technology with Bing’s. At the same time, we have discovered that Ask Jeeves has been serving Google-crawled pages. Are we going to lose half of the top four search engines?
The recently announced deal between Bing and Yahoo! will essentially kill off the Yahoo! search engine – the search results on Yahoo! will be served by Bing, and Microsoft gets Yahoo!’s search technology. This means that the number two and number three search engines will (pending regulatory approval of the deal) become a single search engine.
At the same time, we recently discovered that the number four search engine, Ask Jeeves, appears to be showing web pages which were provided in some way by Google.
So are the "big four" set to become just the "big two"? What would this do to the search marketplace?
Make no mistake about it – the consolidation of search engines is bad for site owners. Instead of having multiple search engines where you have a chance of ranking for your keywords, you will have only two. You’ll either get lots of traffic, or almost none, and swings in web traffic will become more severe.
As you can see, homogenous ecosystems are not healthy environments in which to live. Unfortunately, to an extent, this is what we already have, as Google has such great dominance in the search world. In an ideal world, there would be no dominant search engine, just lots of smaller ones with market shares of no more than 20-30%.
Tags: acquisitions, antitrust, ask, Google, Microsoft, yahoo!
Pravesh says:
July 30, 2009
They have to work hard compete with Search Engine Master.
Emma Kane says:
August 1, 2009
Google has >90% market share in the UK – the battle is lost, for now….