February 25, 2010 (CAP Newswire) – After nearly two years of failed attempts and half-starts, Microsoft and Yahoo finally won approval from U.S. and European Union regulators of a plan to merge search engine marketing services.
“Microsoft will take over Yahoo’s organic and paid search results and blend those resources into Bing,” Erick Schonfeld writes at the Washington Post. “Yahoo will continue to control the front-end UI of search on Yahoo’s sites, and consumers will continue to see and be able to use the Yahoo search engine.”
The deal may still take until the end of the year to be fully completed, and those advertisers using Yahoo may not see a transition to Bing until early 2011.
The big question, though: Can this deal actually make a new search engine that’s competitive with Google? Though still coming in at a distant second place, Bing’s numbers have been more positive in recent months, demonstrating that there could be some room for competition after all.