Chuck Aikens

There have been some recent updates on the merger between search engine power houses Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing. Probably the biggest news is their merger was approved by both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission. Both found that the merger does not violate antitrust laws.

Going forward Yahoo has decided to shut down its own search engine and return results from Bing. However, Yahoo contends that it is still a search company because it will provide tools that make its search experience unique. Search Pad and Search Scan are two Yahoo tools that provide extra functionality. Yahoo still has the right to display their results any way they wish even though they are being generated by Microsoft’s software. Yahoo will also provide search results from its own holdings of which two examples are Yahoo! Sports and Yahoo! Health.

One thing that was unexpected at the time the merger deal was struck is that Bing has started to erode the market share of Yahoo instead of Google. Now that the merger will be allowed to take place, Bing will actually be the stronger search engine going into the deal. When the two technologies are fully combined, sometime around the end of 2010, they are expected to be in a stronger position to start stealing away market share from the power house Google. While Google maintains approximately 70% of the market share in the U.S. it boasts a 90% market share oversees. The merger hopes to include features that will make both search engines more appealing to their foreign search users in order to start closing the gap on Google in the overseas market.