Microsoft and Yahoo Merge and Bing Will Expand Facebook

Microsoft is once again showing its muscle in the world of Search Engines and in building advertising. Google has been dominating the world in being the #1 search engine since 66% of Americans and 90% of Europeans use Google as their preferred search engine.

To help both Yahoo and Microsoft compete in the search engine wars they have decided to form an alliance. This alliance is moving forward with the expectation of retaining their combined users as well as growing some to make them the second largest search engine being used in the world.

Most of the drive to combine resources and to help each other gain in market share revolves around the revenue generated from the ads generated by per-click and page views. By combining the efforts, they can share the ad revenue between both Microsoft and Yahoo.

These changes will also allow Yahoo to focus more on innovation of their search product and in bringing about a better overall experience to the end user. Microsoft brings to the table features like mapping, street-level photos, and a visual search experience. The merger will also bring some jobs from yahoo over to the software giant.

On the tails of this merger, Microsoft is working on a deal to help people search through Facebook using the Microsoft product Bing. To accomplish this task Microsoft and Facebook have agreed to offer full access to Bing's features like photos, video, and maps to Facebook users. What this means to the average user is that content is fully searchable. So you want to find out more about a friend, you can put their name into the search field and Bing's search feature technology will scale through all of Facebook looking for the name you put into the search field.

Bing is looking to put together a similar deal with Twitter, making it even easier to find content on the site. Twitter needs all the help that it can get in this arena as users continue to complain that they cannot find what they are looking for on Twitter. This deal would definitely be a win-win for both.

With the deals that Microsoft is putting together with Bing, Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo they are showing that they are upping the ante of what the end user should expect from a search engines and social media sites. The next year or so will be most interesting as these companies combine resources and start to merge technologies.

www.microsoft.com