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Microsoft’s plans to buy Yahoo’s internet search and search advertising businesses have been cleared by both European and US regulators. This will mean Bing powers the natural search results for Yahoo! and Yahoo! will handle advertising for Bing.
Microsoft and Yahoo! finalised the purchase in early December, shortly after the competition regulators in Canada and Australia approved the deal. With other countries expected to follow suit, UK search marketing agency Greenlight, is predicting the search landscape would be a two horse race by the end of the year, drawing attention to “Microhoo”.
“Having pledged 5-10% of their operating profits ($22.5 billion in 2008) to promoting Bing over the next 5 years, Microsoft has a good chance of increasing Bing’s market share over the next year, much as they have in the US,” said Adam Bunn, Head of SEO at Greenlight.
“That could make ‘Microhoo’ worth paying much more attention to from an SEO perspective,” he said.
Greenlight’s top 10 predictions for paid and natural search in 2010:
1. Investment into ‘TwitFaceSpace’ will continue to rise
2. Google’s Twitter integration will change fundamentally
3. Google factors the content of videos into page relevancy scores
4. Internet use on mobile phones will accelerate and mobile search will take off
5. Search will be a two horse race by the end of the year, attention to “Microhoo”
6. Google will find more ways to monetise the excess inventory in AdWords
7. Winning the click will be more important than ever
8. There will be increased spends across Google’s Contextual Network
9. Latency becomes part of the Google algorithm
10. Domain structure will play a bigger role for Paid Search
For more information head over to Greenlight’s blog at blog.greenlightsearch.com