Face it, beyond Google, Bing, and Yahoo, there are no other players in the US. Sure, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller search engines and some are major players in other countries, but here in the US there really are only the big three. Today the field was officially narrowed to two. (at least for organic results.) Yahoo announced on their blog today that they have successfully integrated Bing into the backend of their search engine. Here’s a blog post from Bing saying pretty much the same thing but offering a timeline for the PPC transition to happen. Am I surprised? No. I knew this was coming. Microsoft has been trying to buy Yahoo since early 2008.
So what does this mean? It means less competition to deliver awesome organic results. It means that Yahoo now has Bing’s crappy index. On Google, I’m #1 for the search “kansas city internet marketing” but in Bingahoo I’m not placed until the bottom of page two. What’s the #1 result in Bingahoo? Yellowpages. Ugh – I remember when yellowpages dominated the search results everywhere before the Google algorithm got sophisticated enough to put them where they actually belonged, instead of relying on artificially created massive link counts. What’s after Yellowpages? Directories, junk websites, and spammers. The Bing index kind of looks like the Google index from about 2003. Bing is really susceptible to manipulation and delivers what I consider dirty results. It’s where I go to see the people that are getting filtered out by Google.
Any time there is regulation imposed or a reduction in competition on the web, it’s a sad day for search. RIP Yahoo!
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It is VERY easy to manipulate Bing, but I think they may have left some holes open intentionally. If marketers know that, they will obviously exploit the opportunities while doing everything they can to push more of their clients and associates to use Bing instead of Google. This could create a change in market share relatively quickly and give Google some serious challenges.