There have been announcements in recent weeks about closer co-operation between the Bing And Yahoo search platforms. The intention must be to improve market share in search at lower cost, but what difference will it make to a typical business that thinks in terms of Google as the main target of any promotional work such as search optimization?
As with many of the rumoured changes in policy concerning search platforms, the greater effect will be noticed in bought advertising, whether through banner or pay-per-click. For enterprises relying on results achieved from a raised natural search engine positioning using search engine optimisation techniques, there should be no visible difference. It may provoke more competition between the search platforms in the battle to attract advertisers if the alliance leads to an increased share of the market, gaining advertisers from Google, but this appears unlikely. Bing may be drawing more visitors resulting from its own advertising or being the default search associated with Hotmail, but Google is still the brand that has become the verb associated with making a search query.
For the usual business for which bought banner advertising is too expensive, the use of search engine optimisation remains the best promotional tool and the Bing / Yahoo alliance is a world away. It is just like being a lowly employee of a large organization: you should be aware of these high-level reports but they have very little influence on your everyday activities, and if you are active as a search optimization specialist you continue to try to develop the natural search engine positioning of your enterprise’s website.
The typical searching client is not going to notice the difference either. He will continue to use the search facility that happens to be associated with his browser or the media outlet he is reading at the time without making a explicit choice of search facility to use, and it just happens to display some adverts. He is going to be more aware of obtrusive adverts than the search facility that is displaying them.
Yahoo used to be the market leader but has been struggling to keep up with the major search companies for some time. This new alliance appears to allow Yahoo to use more of the Bing engine in search queries made through Yahoo thus allowing Yahoo to employ fewer employees of its own. Yahoo expects to preserve its own character as a site, but it still needs to attract customers to see the bought advertising on its site. Most users tend to stick with one search facility and rarely change.
Microsoft has made a great effort to advertise Bing as an alternative to Google. It is difficult to see how Bing much will gain from the alliance, unless there are still areas of the world where Yahoo remains the search facility of choice. From the point of view of a small business, applying search engine optimisation techniques should work for any traditional search facility, and while Google remains the dominant outlet in the UK we will still think in terms of a Google page one search engine positioning. We are unlikely to be changing the search optimization philosophy in the near future.