Search Marketing Blog
The Big Bing Theory
Posted by Sean McMahon on 07.29.2009
Today’s announcement that Yahoo! will be turning its search engine over to Microsoft made me a little nostalgic for early days when our online search universe was just forming with hundreds of rapidly expanding solar systems, dying stars, and ominous black holes. One of the largest galaxies in our universe during the late 1990’s (when I entered this fledgling space) was Inktomi, which was purchased by the very-same Yahoo! in 2002. As most veteran Internet star gazers know, Inktomi commanded a market share of more than 42% of all online searches performed in the United States in 1999. With today’s celestial collision between Microsoft and Yahoo!, it is safe to say that Inktomi has become a proverbial red dwarf.
Microsoft’s newly re-named search engine, Bing, is contracted to be Yahoo!’s search provider for the next ten (10) years. While, admittedly, only a nanosecond in the more than 13.5 billion years that our actual universe has existed, this amount of time equals Google’s entire lifetime to date! The 10-year arrangement will give Microsoft access to the Internet’s second-largest search engine audience, which should enable the Redmond-based software company to better confront Google, which is by far the leader in online search and advertising.
Microsoft was able to put this colossal search arrangement together without having to pay billions and billions of dollars, which it had offered Yahoo! over the past several years. In exchange for allowing Bing to provide its Natural search results, Yahoo! will retain eighty-eight percent (88%) of all revenue earned through Sponsored Listings advertising on its site during the next five (5) years. In addition, Yahoo! also has the right to sell its Sponsored Listings on some Microsoft sites.
In an attempt to travel back to the days of single lens telescopes, here is a celestial map of the major bodies in our search universe, circa August 1999:
Northern Light: 16%
AltaVista: 15.5%
Inktomi (Snap): 15.5%
Inktomi (HotBot): 11.3%
Inktomi (MSN Search): 8.5%
Infoseek: 8.0%
Google: 7.8%
Inktomi (Yahoo): 7.4%
Excite: 5.6%
Lycos: 2.5%
Euroseek: 2.2%
Today, of course, Google commands well over sixty-three percent (63%) of all domestic online searches. However, this announcement today enables Yahoo! and Microsoft to handle more than twenty-seven percent (27%) percent of the Internet searches in the United States. Could this be the beginning of the Big Bing Theory?!!
