Microsoft and Yahoo merger what does it mean to the average Internet user and why is it happening today?
For the next decade many industry researchers think that the Internet search engine results page will dictate the flow of Internet traffic much like it does today. This process of search engine optimization has created its own breed of developers that have specialized in the process and the industry has rapidly expanded last few years.
The merger between Microsoft and Yahoo hopes to break up the tight hold Google now has over search engine traffic. Google is responsible for over 70% of search engine users on the Internet today. This statistic allows Google to dictate where traffic goes 70% of the time through its search engine results. This has created almost a death grip on not only Microsoft and Yahoo on the Internet but most of the companies, all of the companies, present on the Internet today.
If Google decides that they want to blacklist you then that means 70% of the traffic is going to skip right on by your site and despite Robert Murdoch recently declaring that he was going to pull the Wall Street Journal from the Google search results that would almost mean death for the Wall Street Journal online and possibly even off-line because the revenues would be gone.
Yahoo is on the brink of selling its search engine to Microsoft who will be merging it with their own search engine Bing. The details of the deal include Yahoo still retaining revenue, a large portion of the revenue, that is generated through users that surf to Yahoo pages through the improved Microsoft search.
Yahoo is still a very healthy company and in this year alone in the second quarter pulled down over $350 million just in their advertisements on their sites. This signals to the rest of the industry that Yahoo still knows what it is doing and Microsoft recognizes that.
The merger could be the closest thing there is to be able to break up the death grip Google has on the search engine industry but it is almost still a David and Goliath scenario. Microsoft is not a newcomer to Internet wars and most of us remember the browser wars that happened in the 90s, does anyone remember Netscape? Most of the Internet users today do not.
There is however a backdoor that Yahoo is fully expected to take advantage of after the merger is said and done. Yahoo will still be in full control of the way the search engine works and will also still be in control of the results page which has many industry professionals wondering if Yahoo will just funnel traffic to its own (Yahoo) pages and advertisers as a priority to attain that large portion of the revenue that is being generated.
