At long last, Microsoft and Yahoo are ready to begin putting the technological pieces in place behind their multiyear, multibillion-dollar deal to see Yahoo’s search infrastructure outsourced to Microsoft’s Bing. It’s all in the name of taking on the No. 1 search player, Google, of course, and despite the milestone, both challengers have a great deal of work still ahead of them.
Yahoo and Microsoft’s long-pending search deal has cleared almost all regulatory hurdles, and for the second- and third-place players in search, it’s now time to get down to implementation.
Under terms of the ten-year, exclusive agreement, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) will provide its Bing search infrastructure to Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) sites in return for a portion of the advertising revenues.
Yahoo and Microsoft initially announced their groundbreaking search deal late last July in a bid to better compete against search giant Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). Though the two officially signed-off on the search agreement in early December, it’s only now that regulatory officials in both the U.S. and the European Commission (EC) have agreed to the deal. As a result, the road is now clear for Yahoo and Microsoft to begin putting the deal into practice.