Following up with what we just reported earlier about the plausibility of search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo!, the deal has finally matured and the entire web is resonating with this breaking news to the highest magnitude. Just about everyone is talking about this deal, its implications on the search landscape and how Microsoft and Yahoo! are going to benefit from this deal.

Folks are also wondering if this is a ‘killer deal’ with regard to Google. Whether Google will loose out its dominant position in coming time as the two big forces unite together ? We reckon, YES. And we have enough reasons to back our notion.

Here are the 10 key reasons why Microsoft-Yahoo deal is a stepping stone to non-monopolised search market scenario.

1. After this deal gets into action, Bing’s search share will grow to around 28%, much more competitive to Google’s current search share of 65%.

2. A bigger search market share will also attract more advertisers, both premium and self-serving to Bing search engine, implying more revenues.

3. More search volume would also ensure that Microsoft gains more search revenues and further invests more into Bing.

4. This deal brings together the best of the two companies, Yahoo’s search volume & sales force and Microsoft’s search innovations & heavy-weight marketing.

5. The term of the Microsoft-Yahoo agreement is 10 years, pretty enough time for Microsoft and Yahoo! to outsmart Google in search landscape and become the new market leader.

6. It could only be deep pocketed Microsoft who could dare spending over $100 Million in marketing their search engine. Now, with plenty of search volume coming from Yahoo!, the power of money will speak out even louder to the end users.

7. After two months of Bing’s debue, it’s a proven fact now that Bing is a better performer than Google. Now, with more search volume, there will be more users using a better search engine (that’s Bing) and hence would have more tendency to recommend it to massive Google addicts.

8. As per the search deal, Yahoo! is to take care of the premium ad publishers for both the companies, which would let Microsoft AdCenter compete head-on with Google AdWords and Microsoft PubCenter with Google AdSense.

9. As Yahoo! is no more in Search business, end users have only two effective search destinations now, Google and Bing. This fact may also help Bing steal some of the market share from Google.

10. Bing has been raking in natural buzz, simply because the quality speaks for itself. With more search volume coming in, there will be more poeple realizing a better alternative to Google, which may help Bing gaining market share faster.

As we just reported in our last post, Bing has been doing everything it possibly can, to keep the fire burning against Big Search Daddy, Google. And the latest news is really a BIG blow. Yahoo! is in final stages to settle for a deal with Microsoft, to make Bing, its search provider. The deal would basically benefit the two parties through a revenue sharing model.

Yahoo! was in talks with Microsoft execs for the past couple of weeks regarding this search deal but the deal couldn’t be finalised because Yahoo! wanted some initial lumpsum money(hundreds of millions of dollars) to settle for the revenue sharing deal with Microsoft. Microsoft wasn’t really willing to pay any lumpsum amount and therefore the talks stretched too far.

If the rumors are to be believed, Yahoo-Microsoft talks may materialise by the end of this week which will help Bing grow from a search market share of 8.4% to somewhere around 29%. This would benefit Yahoo! from every end. It would get to save the search infrastructure and R&D costs it is bearing right now and would also help making more money with better search engine and ad click rates.

As the deal consolidates, Bing will find itself in much stronger position(29%) in front of Google(65%).

Although Bing had a decent and abuzzed launch but Microsoft isn’t getting carried away with this moment of success, simply because the dynamics can swing either way any moment. Bing leapfrogged Yahoo! twice so far but consistent win over Yahoo! in search battle is still to be achieved.

And now, it appears that team at Bing is focussing on a more critical factor that can influence the end users to actually make a Switch(from Google, of course): Search Engine Crawler efficiency using new Bing bot

The problem

Generally, if anyone who owns a web property(a website or a blog) on internet would need to judge how the abuzzed search engine(bing) stands in front of the De facto search destination(Google) then the first few searches are most probable to be ‘Ego‘ searches.

And if, the user realises that his website or Facebook/Twitter profile is making into the top ten search results then he may rate the search engine, much higher than normal and may also suggest his family and friends to switch to that search engine.

Now, as the majority of the websites or blogs aren’t as big and frequent as NYTimes or Wired, it’s probably one of the the toughest challenges for any search engine to keep everyone happy with the crawl rate and faster indexing of hundreds of millions of small and occasional-to-rarely updated websites/blogs, together with maintaining the Search relevance.

And i must admit that Bing, although step ahead of Google in many dimensions, is still a poor performer than Google when it comes to crawling and appreciating fresh and relevant content in its search results.

The latest Bing update addresses the above issue as they have finally worked out a new web crawler for Bing (or Bing bot).

The new Bing bot user agent string will be msnbot/2.0b, compared to the old msn crawler, which is  msnbot/1.1. Bing has decided not to change the name of the Bing bot (for no specific reasons). The crawler work is on priority for Bing now as it’s a critical factor for Bing and still needs a lot of work before standing competitive in front of Google in this regard.

Although Bing has a new crawler now but the old crawler(msnbot/1.1) will continue to persist.

One reason why we literally hate using Yahoo! search is because of the Stale search results it presents. We would be pleasantly surprised to see Bing bots indexing websites and blogs, faster than Google’s. (Are you hearing Bing bots?)

Here’s what Techcrunch has to say about this !

It’s just over a month since Bing came into existance and the early signs are really positive. I have to admit that Bing doesn’t really smell like a typical Microsoft product…To me, it seems like a refreshing change after sticking with Google for years.

And it seems that Bing doesn’t like staying out of  buzz. It has probably been the most abuzzed topic last month, both in Blogosphere  and Twitterverse. Be it leapfrogging Yahoo! or integrating Bing within Hotmail or loads of other news and updates about Bing, Bing seems unignorable to the world of Internet at the moment.

Yesterday, Bing announced another important move to make it more useful for the people(or may be tweeple). It announced the launch of a new service called BingTweets.com, a service that Bing launched in partnership with Federated Media and Twitter.

Long story short, Bingtweets brings live Twitter feed and Bing search results on a single webpage. On the left side, you will see cluster of popular trending topics on Twitter and you can also see popular people, places and products on twitter as well. The moment you click on any of those popular topics or search any keyword within the Search box, you will see the live twitter feed on the left side and Bing search results on the right side, on the topic/keyword you clicked/searched for.

This service can save you time, especially when you want to see what’s logically relevant (bing search results) and what people are saying right now(Twitter feed) about the stuff you want to query about.

But there are many issues getting raised by bing skeptics, about the search habits and probability of users actually making a switch to Bing, even if it seems a better performer than Google.

To a larger extent, it’s a hard truth. No matter, how much money is spent by Microsoft in spreading the word about Bing and how good the search engine is, a habit(either good or bad) is tough to change. And as Google has been the default search engine for hundreds of millions of users so far, the task for Bing is really, really tough.

So, the million dollar question is... Can Bingtweets make Tweeple drift from Google to Bing ?

May be. But that is for sure that Bingtweets will help keeping tweeples engaged with Bing, no matter if those tweeple make an actual drift(changing their default search engine) to Bing or not.

I would love to see a Bingtweets Firefox add-on for searching from my browser itself.

I just stumbled over an article on TechCrunch that highlights another recent event of Bing overtaking Yahoo! in Search market share. Robin Wauters of TechCrunch certainly considers this leapfroging(that too for the second time since Bing’s launch) a great milestone for Bing.com.

I agree with Wauters when i observe that Google has no other competitor than Bing, after Yahoo! is sidelined but there’s one more thing i would like to add here. Even if Yahoo! stayed on second position for most of the time since Bing’s launch(beaten only two times so far by Bing) but i genuinely don’t think that Bing.com really cares where Yahoo! is.

Yahoo! is currently a struggling search engine. Look at Yahoo.com and you would realize that it’s world’s no.2 website, not because it’s a powerful search engine but actually because of those slurry of other features and content that Yahoo! flashes on its homepage.

Compare the search results and you would realise that Yahoo! search results stands nowhere compared to both Google and Bing’s .

In my opinion, the only target in Microsoft’s mind is to have a direct face-off with Google and steal atleast 30-35% of its search market share in a span of 2-3 years. Overtaking Yahoo! will just be a part of their growth chart, nothing else.

As far as this leapfroging is concerned, i can foresee Bing.com, replacing Yahoo! as the 2nd ranker on a consistent basis within 2-3 months. (Mark my words…)